"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Play Dirty

Man, this new straight-to-Amazon-Prime movie PLAY DIRTY is some kind of monkey’s paw shit for me. It’s the great Shane Black (THE NICE GUYS) writing and directing for the first time in seven years, returning to crime movies for the first time in nine years, and it’s based on my favorite crime series ever, Richard Stark’s Parker books. The catch is that most of what I want from a Shane Black movie (such as the quippy dialogue) I definitely do not want in a Parker adaptation, and they originally had Robert Downey, Jr. cast in the role, which seemed like a problem. Could he really seem intimidating enough to be Parker, and more importantly would he even know how to shut the fuck up with his little smart ass comments? I didn’t think he would.

But I wish I could’ve found out, because Downey got replaced with Mark Wahlberg (PLANET OF THE APES), also a poor fit but in a less intriguing way. Downey is a totally different type than the character, while Wahlberg sorta aspires to being the right type, he just doesn’t have enough of it. I know people dislike him now due to past crimes, dumbass interviews and lowered quality standards, but I’m too old to entirely let go – I haven’t forgotten that exciting alchemy of the most uncool pop rapper of the ‘90s winning us over with a great performance in BOOGIE NIGHTS, nor have I forsaken THE BIG HIT, THREE KINGS, I HEART HUCKABEES, THE DEPARTED, THE OTHER GUYS, THE FIGHTER, etc. So it’s not Marky Markophobia when I say he doesn’t seem believably cunning enough, or intimidating enough. The other characters have to treat him as if he is, but I don’t quite buy it. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel the vibrations.

I appreciate the effort, though. For the majority of the movie Wahlberg grimaces and brow-furls and sometimes even wears suits like Lee Marvin, staying somewhat true to the serious professional who can be absolutely ruthless but, he explains, won’t necessarily go around killing people when it would bring too much attention. But Black surrounds him with his enjoyably quirky characters, gives them goofy things to talk about, and also if he thinks of a funny thing for Parker to say, or a thing he can do that violates his stated code but gets a chuckle, he doesn’t have the discipline not to use it. So I’d say this is the first Parker movie that’s straight up an action comedy.

Even the definitive Parker film POINT BLANK humanized the character a little, gave him some emotions, I’m used to that. They also make him do some very Parker-like things. I winced when he gave a bundle of cash to a bystander, and sighed with relief when another character pointed out that it would keep her quiet when questioned by police. Yes, Parker would do that, if that was his reasoning.

He also follows his literary counterpart’s rule of abstaining from sex or romance during a job. When tits are flashed his way he doesn’t get a boner, he gets suspicious. In that area Black has outclassed many of the other adapters, so he’s got my respect, but late in the game he commits one of the most egregious sins of any Parker movie when – I say this with a heavy heart – Parker tells a lady a childhood origin story of how he became a criminal and got his philosophy of life. I assume Black gets Parker, knows why that sort of self reflection is in violent opposition to everything that makes the character special, so this must be a conscious decision to prioritize making a normal movie about normal bullshit over being true to the character. All the more reason to have called it PLAY DIRTY, starring Mark Wahlberg as Packer, based on no character, from no books, by nobody.

These are, of course, my hang ups, as a weirdo incapable of mentally separating this particular movie from its source material. And I’ve been through this before, most recently in 2013’s not very good PARKER starring Jason Statham. This one’s different in that the script by Black & Charles Mondry (ROAD HOUSE 2024) & Anthony Bagarozzi (THE NICE GUYS) is not even based on a specific Parker book, it’s their stab at a Stark-like heist of their own invention. But it is specifically set in “The Violent World of Parker.” LaKeith Stanfield (THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB) plays Grofield, a reoccurring book character who joins in many of Parker’s heists to fund his life as a theater actor. (He even has two spinoff books.) Their crew includes Ed Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key, WONKA) and his girlfriend Brenda (Claire Lovering, SAN ANDREAS), characters from several books starting with Plunder Squad, as well as Stan Devers (Chai Hansen) from The Green Eagle Score, Plunder Squad and Butcher’s Moon. And I might be wrong but I think the guy the say made them a special snow vehicle is the guy who souped up some cars in The Outfit.

The story also involves The Outfit, the corporately structured mob that Parker often goes up against in the books, and a major plot point is him being banned from New York for having robbed them. They’re now led by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE), which was the name of a mob boss in Butcher’s Moon. Also Parker uses the alias Charles Willis, which lasted him most of the series. So, it’s not the Parker I want but there are too many details from the books for me to forget what it’s supposed to be.

It opens with a heist at a horse race track that goes awry when a random dude tries to steal the money from them, and then when getaway driver Zen (ALITA BATTLE ANGEL herself Rosa Salazar) betrays them. Regular Parker shit, and he promises his dead partner’s widow (Gretchen Mol, GET CARTER, 3:10 TO YUMA) that he’ll get her share and kill Zen for her. But when he finds Zen she drags him into a larger heist she was trying to get seed money for, stealing an ancient treasure that the corrupt president of Fictional South American Country has hired The Outfit to steal.

LIke any Parker book or heist movie there’s lots of questioning and fighting different guys, making different plans, having the plans go wrong and coming up with backups on the fly. More like a different type of movie than a Parker movie, these activities often explode into big action spectacle. They purposely crash a train, get into big shootouts and chases with flipping cars, even FAST & FURIOUS style high speed vehicle hopping. The digital FX are definitely not at a theatrical (or Michael Bay streaming) level of quality but there is some imaginative mayhem, like when the opening heist bleeds onto the race track and there are horses running over cars and vice versa.

Stark’s books have a sense of humor to them, but not really jokes. This has many jokes, and I did laugh at many of them, for what it’s worth. Tonally it’s more Black than Stark, which will be okay for non-devotees, but it’s a new problem for Parker adaptations. The score by Alan Silvestri (BACK TO THE FUTURE) contributes to the wacky feel and sometimes veers too far into WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT for this material. At other times I liked how straight up retro corny sounding it’s willing to go.

I wonder if all this cute-ifying might backfire with normal people, though, because when Movie Parker Who Got This Way When He Was a Child resolves the story’s most dramatic conflict in a particularly cold-hearted way even I thought shit, Parker. That’s fucked up, man. Might be too much of a bummer for people who were on board for light entertainment.

Thomas Jane (STANDER) is great as a member of the crew on the race track job, and of course I started picturing what it would be like with him as Parker. But I get it, Jane would not sell as many tickets as Wahlberg so you gotta— wait a minute, they didn’t sell tickets to this anyway, why the fuck do they care? What the fuck is wrong with these billionaires, inventing a fake business model where they dump hundreds of millions into movies that make the same amount whether they’re watched by the entire population of earth or zero people, and then they still insist on making compromises for imaginary commercial considerations? These people have no imagination, no soul, no life.

(Speaking of which, there is a sucky billionaire character in this and WEIRD CAMEO SPOILER he’s introduced having dinner with Mark Cuban, who Parker shoots. Yes, I laughed at the craziness of it but also it’s such a sad “see, he has a sense of humor, billionaires are people too!” move. Elon Musk Hosting SNL Syndrome.)

My nerdiest fan question, but also my best, is why Black & Co. didn’t follow the cool structure that Westlake/Stark used for most of the books. They’re divided into four sections, and at the end of the second section Parker gets betrayed or caught or something and then the third section skips back and takes on the p.o.v. of one of the supporting characters (usually someone we didn’t know was up to something) to show us what was really going on, leading up to Parker’s current dilemma. I took inspiration from that in my horror book so you bet your ass I’d want to do it if I was trying to make up an official Parker story. Oh well. I’m sure he has a reason.

Partly because of that structure I’ve felt for years now that the way to adapt Parker would be as a TV series with one book per season. In fact Amazon now do that really well with Reacher, and they specialize in making shows based on book series characters like Jack Ryan, Alex Cross and Whoever Bosch, so it’s kinda funny that they’d waste Parker on this. But PLAY DIRTY has more style to it than a show would, and even if it’s Black’s worst or second worst movie (I don’t hate THE PREDATOR as much as the rest of society) it’s probly better than some of the streamer dump movies if you’re not hung up on the books like I am. And let’s face it, you probly aren’t. Here’s hoping it does well enough (whatever that means for a movie that doesn’t have to do anything) that Black gets to make another movie soon, but bad enough that it’s not another Parker movie.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

56 Responses to “Play Dirty”

  1. A new Shane Black is always a blessing, but man, this is really testing me. First there’s the streaming of it all. If a movie doesn’t come out on disc, I kind of don’t think it exists. Then there’s Wahlberg. He’s too much of a macho clown to take seriously anymore. And as much as I am here for Black doing his usual schtick, it sure seems like Black doing Parker is two great tastes that are gonna taste like shit together. Cole slaw and grape jelly. Chocolate and tartar sauce. Pork and blueberries. But maybe I can tell myself that this is just some other guy named Parker who just also happens to rob stuff. That’s how I got through the Statham Parker movie, and this is bound to be better than that. It’s a common name. I’m sure there’s plenty of guys named Parker out there. We can just say Wahlberg’s playing one of them. We can just leave the books out of this entirely. It seems like that’s what practically everybody who adapts them does anyway.

  2. I dunno, man. This was one of the most morally-ugly, unpleasant films I’ve seen all year. This reminded me of watching Bad Boys II for the first time. Do you think the actions of the protagonists, and the yuk-yuk blasé approach to their incredibly violent-around-innocent-people antics, would have been as easy to watch if you weren’t familiar with the books? I’ve never read the books, so I don’t know how he’s supposed to be, but the Wahlberg character here is exceptionally vile.

    Honestly, I’m not opposed to that kind of character – big Wolf Creek fan, love Mick Taylor and Art the Clown and so on – but they’re not really positioned as the side we’re supposed to be rootin’ for. The effects being so poor didn’t help matters either.

  3. I hadn’t even heard about this til a film / Parker nerd friend texted me about it earlier today… and that he was sad to report it is “all wrong”. Bummer. I can see how it would be a challenge to make a movie around a character whose defining traits are that he looks like a slab of rock and that he’s a terrifying, humorless bastard who’s only out for #1 but… if you’re going to say it’s a Parker story, no quips and no backstory for pete’s sake, just put the big creep in the middle of normal people scheming and screwing up his plans and let it roll. I feel like we need the studio execs from Barton Fink in on this. “Whaddya need, a roadmap??”

    But hey, on a happier note, for any other Parker fans here (including you Sr. Outlaw), I highly recommend the Crissa Stone books by Wallace Stroby, starting with “Cold Shot to the Heart”. The protagonist is as close to a female Parker as it’s possible to get – she lives a little more in the human world of emotions and attachments but not much, and other than that it’s straight up Stark style mayhem. All 4 novels are awesome. The “Wyatt” series by Garry Disher is an even closer analogue, Parker but in Australia.

  4. I remain convinced that Robert Downey, Jr. was supposed to be playing Grofield, and somehow (probably “Robert Downey, Jr. to star in Parker movie!” reports) it got all fucked up in translation.

  5. billydeethrilliams

    October 3rd, 2025 at 2:27 am

    So… time to review The Outfit then? Or a Point Blank re-review?

  6. Yeah, this is so frustrating, because in some ways it does satisfy. It does have those Shane Black touches — even the extras are wiseasses. And Parker, as written, is a little flexible from the source, but he’s still pretty ruthless. Marky Mark just… sucks. He’s not a good actor, and he only has so many variations on the same hardass jerk he’s been playing for decades. This is the same asshole from “Contraband” and “Max Payne” and a number of those forgettable programmers he did over the ages.

    A word about the cameo… it’s super distracting, because Mark Cuban is playing MARK CUBAN. When he gets shot and people just walk off… haven’t we just found out from the Luigi Mangione situation that this would be a MASSIVE scandal? Shooting CEOs has a much darker implication today, and the movie just handwaves it away as a gag. I mean, fuck Mark Cuban (and Elon On SNL is an accurate comparison), but it’s pretty loaded to just put that in there as a gag. In real life, Parker would become public enemy number one after that moment, and Cuban would be some bullshit “saint.”

  7. Let’s get to the important shit… I can’t be the only one thinking that pork would actually go pretty good with blueberries.

  8. I’m with you on that one, emteem.

    My only real familiarity with Parker is through the Darwyn Cooke graphic novels. But it has me thinking– if the Verninites were making this movie, who would be the right casting for Parker these days? I was thinking Michael Shannon, Jon Hamm, maybe a Frank Grillo or Chiwetel Ejiofor?

  9. Michael Shannon is, of course, the obvious, first, and only choice.

    I have thought more about the pork/blueberries combination and realized that it might actually be pretty good. In that same spirit of deliciously unlikely combinations, I will watch this movie with an open mind in November, when my spiritual beliefs do not forbid it. As you all know, watching a non-horror movie between October first and Samhain will cause the demons of the forest to rise from their ancient slumber and ruin our crops and steal our firstborns. I once again lodge a complaint on religious grounds against studios releasing action movies in October. We have enough problems as it is without taunting the eldritch horrors.

  10. When someone told me that Wahlberg was playing Parker, I shrugged and responded “Maybe Idris Elba or Marko Zaror weren’t available” completely off the top of my head

    So, since my that’s who my subconscious likes, I’ll take the concept of “dream casting” at face value

  11. I agree with this review wholeheartedly. Maybe a decent movie, but a distractingly bad Parker adaptation yet again, and it’s not up to the standards of Shane Black’s other movies besides.

  12. I don’t necessarily want to blame Shane Black directly. It could be that he honestly tried to make a real Parker movie and producers and quite possibly Wahlberg himself got involved with all kinds of notes and he couldn’t make what he wanted. But this just feels really gross. Getting Parker wrong is one thing, but throwing out excessive references in order to garner the cache and cool of the character and the books but then ignoring and contradicting the actual content and things that make the books cool is really another level of Hollywood fuckery. Fuck this movie.

  13. Glaive – It’s a good example of what I was talking about, Black prioritizing a funny joke over the characterization. Parker has even explicitly explained that he doesn’t kill people when it will cause too much of a commotion and here he casually assassinates a celebrity billionaire for no reason.

  14. I had next to zero interest in this because I was unaware that it was a Shane Black film, nor a Parker film, the advertising I have seen seemed hesitant to point these things out.

    More important to this thread though, I wanted to inform Mr. Majestyk that pork loin and blueberries do indeed fuck, via a balsamic compote with Rosemary, black pepper and lemon zest, also is good on tofurkeys.

  15. I think I liked this more than Vern, but a lot of it is undercooked, and Wahlberg is really miscast. I can’t buy him as a criminal mastermind. And I couldn’t buy the central romantic attraction, or mutual respect, or whatever the hell it was, and that’s not entirely Wahlberg’s fault — I don’t accept that those two would even have a conversation unless it left one of them as a corpse.

    Then there’s the quips. They were funny. I laughed. But I think it’s notable that in the four Grofield novels that don’t feature Parker, three of them are light-hearted drawing-room mysteries and spy capers, and the only one that’s a heist novel — LEMONS NEVER LIE — is grim and vicious, with Grofield forced to abandon his usual carefree persona. Now, I don’t insist on strict adherence to the books. My second-favourite Parker movie is MADE IN U.S.A., for Christ’s sake. But Westlake was a great judge of tone, and he instinctively knew that it’s hard to make people read about violent, amoral protagonists unless the book is cold as frost.

  16. I agree shooting the celebrity causes a scene but I don’t think he was mortally wounded. It looked like a standard cinema shoulder shot.

  17. In my memory there’s even a shot of him rolling around after the shooting as if to say ‘Don’t worry everyone, he’s alive.’ And since this is on Amazon Prime, I just went on primevideo dot com and skipped to that scene and indeed, my memory is correct. The subtitles even say “[Mark groaning]”. Also the High Evolutionary says ‘You shot Mark Cuban!’ as opposed to ‘You killed Mark Cuban!’ Safe to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt he survived, for what little that is worth.

  18. It was many, many moons ago that an article written by Vern first introduced me to the writing of Stark/Westlake, so it was only appropriate that after watching Play Dirty I immediately came here to read a review of yet another disappointing Parker adaptation. I agree with everyone else, the tone of the film was all over the place. It started out promising enough with a family man impulsively becoming a criminal and, after Parker deals with him, the rest of the gang being only able to guess at Parker’s rationale for his actions. However, then the middle section became increasingly silly and violently slapstick until it felt like the most trigger-happy Dortmunder story ever conceived. But after all that the film careens back to being hardboiled with that downer of an ending. It made all the actions that could be dismissed in a crazy caper romp seem insane in retrospect. How many blocks of New York were squished by that train? Why did a trained, desperate fighter like Zen ever let her guard down around Parker? She shot Parker and his friends at the beginning of the film, and even someone who isn’t a career criminal would probably hold a grudge about something like that. I enjoyed the disparate pieces of the movie in isolation, but I was frustrated by the end of the film because nothing came together as a whole.

  19. Okay, Vern and you folks have been talking up the Parker novels for years, and I’ve finally gotten up the gumption to dive in. Is there a specific one you’d generally recommend to someone as a starting point, and, if that’s not the first one, is it okay to read them in more or less whatever order I like?

  20. There is some minor continuity across a few of them (the money he abandons at the end of one book becomes the MacGuffin he’s after in another, for example) but I have not read them in any kind of strict order and I never felt confused.

    That said, the first book is the perfect intro to the character, and it does set up some plot lines that continue in a roundabout way in the next couple of books, so if you can start there, do so. But if any Parker book crosses your path at any point, whichever one it is, grab it and jump right in. Westlake is such an efficient storyteller that you’ll be right up to speed in no time.

  21. Excellent, thank you! I’m not sure yet if I’ll order that first book online, or just grab whichever one I see first on my next used bookstore visit, but it’s good to know I can’t really go wrong either way.

  22. I don’t think I’ve liked Wahlberg in anything. But after SPENSER I started thinking that he can be used effectively if it’s the right project. So I started PLAY DIRTY with the usual suspicion that you guys were way to critical. But this time you were right. I haven’t read any of the books, but I like almost all the Parker movies. And I love Shane Black. But this was just…meh.

  23. There is some minor continuity across a few of them (the money he abandons at the end of one book becomes the MacGuffin he’s after in another, for example)

    Yeah, that’s Butcher’s Moon, which in many ways is the ‘fan service’ Parker book as it has a lot of callbacks. With that said, it was like the second Parker book I ever read and I didn’t even realize the callbacks were callbacks.

    Man With the Getaway Face is a direct continuation of The Hunter yet I read them completely out of order and was never lost. They operate like old TV shows in that regard. To paraphrase Stan Lee “every Parker book is someone’s first Parker book”

    So am I wrong in assuming when someone says ‘best Parker movie’ they’re talking about Point Blank? Has that reached universal truth status yet?

  24. I forgot that Wahlberg also played Spenser (which makes more sense, because Spenser is kind of a douche). What’s up with him suddenly adapting all these crime novels? You can’t make me believe Wahlberg is a reader. He seems like the type of guy who hasn’t opened a book since the tenth grade. And even then he seems like he’d brag about only reading the Cliff’s Notes or making his girlfriend write his papers for him.

    Mark Wahlberg seems like a fucking idiot is what I’m saying.

  25. And yes, I believe the consensus is that POINT BLANK is the best Parker movie and the only universally praised one. I am a PAYBACK fan (the theatrical version, even) but it doesn’t have the critical support POINT BLANK does.

    Honestly, what other competition does it have? PARKER? SLAYRIDE? You want to talk about a movie that doesn’t respect its source material. That one has 90 minutes of relationship drama and ten minutes of the actual premise of the book. I don’t care how bad PLAY DIRTY is, it’ll never fuck Parker up worse than SLAYRIDE.

  26. Honestly, what other competition does it have? PARKER? SLAYRIDE?

    Well, I was thinking perhaps The Split (which does have a murder’s row of tough guys trying to out tough-guy each other), or The Outfit (which is good) being more Point Blank’s competition.

    I’ve heard complaints of Point Blank being too slow/too arty/deviating from the book too much. (I mean, I heard Angie Dickinson personally call the movie’s ending a “complete fuck-up”). So I wasn’t sure if there was any controversy in universally calling it the best Parker movie

  27. jojo, I was trying to post earlier today to be the first to answer you. But Vern’s internet troll under the bridge wouldn’t let me cross. As I suspected, fans of POINT BLANK have in the meantime supported the universal truth statement. But John Flynn’s THE OUTFIT is the better film, even if Parker is called Earl Macklin in Brian Garfield’s screenplay. The style is somewhat similar to John Boorman’s classic, but it has more cool characters and way more action.

    Vince, maybe SLAYGROUND isn’t a good Parker movie (I wouldn’t know), but it’s still a better film than PLAY DIRTY.

    Well, I will now press enter…again!

  28. I didn’t know THE SPLIT was supposed to be a Parker movie. I’ve seen THE OUTFIT but it didn’t make much of an impression on me. Sometimes I bounce right off that 70s dryness.

    Bearing that in mind, I’m gonna go out of a limb and say SLAYRIDE is both a bad Parker movie and a bad movie, period. I found it almost perversely boring. There’s nothing worse a movie can be than boring, and I have faith that Black will clear that low bar.

  29. I think the best film made/adapted from the Parker books is POINT BLANK – but it’s not necessarily the best ‘adaptation’, in that the film is way to self consciously ‘arty’ and experimental. There’s nothing arty or experimental about the books (in particular the first three, which are definitely the crème de la crème of the series.) They’re straight ahead, ball busting crime novels, lacking any of the intellectual adornment and adventurousness of POINT BLANK. I guess the closest adaptation goes to THE OUTFIT – again, it’s straight ahead, unfussy, TCB style catches the flavour of the books best. Tarantino makes the argument in ‘Cinema Speculation’ that DeNiro in HEAT is the purest screen representation of Parker, right until he goes after Waingro – where it falls apart, and that in a lot of ways certain Michael Mann films (in particular HEAT and THIEF) are the best screen versions of the character and the tone the books were going for. Although he gets it wrong claiming that the ending of THE OUTFIT is a better gun battle/dénouement than the one in THIEF. It’s not.

    Of course the books and characters can be seen in all kinds of noir/crime/thriller movies. In particular, a Walter Matthau film CHARLEY VARRICK has a lot of Parker DNA. Matthau plays a very surprisingly coldblooded criminal who pauses for about 1 second when his wife gets killed infront of him, and he happily dispatches, beats, cheats and screws his way through a number of other conmen, conwomen, whores, stooges and assorted never do wells as he seeks to evade a coldblooded killer played by G.O.A.T. Joe Don Baker. The film was also obviously a major influence on the book & movie NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

  30. I didn’t know THE SPLIT was supposed to be a Parker movie.

    Yeah, it’s The Seventh (I have a copy of The Seventh where it’s titled “The Split”, so I’m guessing it was a post-movie edition). Jim Brown is Parker avatar “McClain” and the rest of the cast is pretty much a who’s-who of hard-guys and weirdos of the year 1968 (Borgnine, Warren Oates, Sutherland, et al). A quintessential ‘Sunday afternoon’ affair.

  31. The best Parker movie is POINT BLANK. The closest movies to the books are THE OUTFIT and MIS À SAC, though in both cases it’s the secondary characters that capture the atmosphere more than the Parker substitute himself. (MIS À SAC is also impossible to see in a decently restored print unless you happen to live in Paris or something. Me, I’m still waiting.)

    Like I said earlier, I love MADE IN U.S.A. A lot of people don’t. It’s not much of a Westlake adaptation; it’s a large-as-life Mondrian painting with Anna Karina looking stylish, fuming about the Ben Barka conspiracy, and occasionally shooting people.

    The worst Parker film, hands down, is SLAYGROUND. They gave up on the book and decided to make a slasher revenge thriller instead, then half-assed that too. Major subplots turn up only to vanish into the ether, never heard from again.

  32. The horribleness of SLAYGROUND is amplified by that being the one book that deliberately breaks the format and actually seems like a big action-packed movie! But they didn’t even use the premise.

    I also like that Majestyk called it by the wrong title several times and none of us corrected him because who gives a shit. I’ll call it SLAY TIME.

  33. It’s that bad, huh? Well, i still think you’re wrong. But it’s not a hill I’m willing to die defending, so I’ll move along. THE OUTFIT on the other hand, Westlake’s personal favorite, I will fight you on the beaches on that one.

    Nice to see CHARLIE VARRICK mentioned. I would add THE ANDERSON TAPES and perhaps THUNDERBOLT & LIGHTFOOT too as kind of Parkeresque.

    And I guess we all agree on THE HOT ROCK being the best Dortmunder movie?

  34. CITY OF INDUSTRY is clearly Stark-influenced, and it’s a pretty good film besides.

    To agree that THE HOT ROCK is the best Dortmunder movie we would be ethically compelled to watch all the Dortmunder movies, and holy hell but some of them look terrible. Three versions of JIMMY THE KID in three different languages and they look about as entertaining as a compound fracture. Even BANK SHOT is shit, and that has George C. Scott.

  35. Today I learned that there was a German Westlake adaptation in the 90s. JIMMY THE KID rang a bell. I wonder if that one actually took place in Dortmund.

  36. What I don’t get, if you’re adapting JIMMY THE KID and just want to make a comedy about a kidnapped boy, you don’t care about the central premise — viz., hapless crooks using a crime novel as a blueprint — then why not just do “The Ransom of Red Chief”? It’s public domain.

  37. Oh, for those who aren’t aware, there’s another Westlake movie this year — Park Chan-wook’s NO OTHER CHOICE, from THE AX, definitely not one of his comedic novels. (Previously adapted by Costa-Gavras; both versions have a good rep, though I haven’t seen either yet.)

  38. I don’t know much about Westlake’s output, except from popculture and the stuff that you guys keep telling. I do know that the Dortmunder books are funny, the Parker books are not. There is a YouTube upload of a TV recording from the German JIMMY THE KID, praised by the uploader as “The best German comedy” (doubt it) and “A movie to make you laugh, think and feel……….!!!!!!!”. Apparently the uploader might be related to Sophie Moser, who played the kidnapped kid here and later as an adult starred on a long running police show and is also an acclaimed violine player. The channel gives me “proud mother” vibes.

    So again: I don’t know anything about the book that it’s based on, but despite the title JIMMY THE KID they kidnap a girl named Jenny. Herbert Knaup (The father from RUN LOLA RUN) plays Dortmunder, popular stage actor and audio book narrator Rufus Beck plays one of his partners and was nominated for a German movie award for this. I didn’t bother to watch the whole thing, but I can imagine that the opening, where the protagonists are standing outside of a hotel window after a heist gone wrong, was taken from the book, because the whole vibe seems like something that an American crime writer would come up with, instead of something from a German late 90s movie. During that scene we also see the Cologne cathedral, so if you were hoping to see Dortmunder drink Dortmunder in Dortmund, you might be disappointed.

    I didn’t bother to watch the whole thing, but the scenes that I stumbled upon varied between “That looks actually not bad” and “Ugh” (The kid is one of those super smart ass movie kids.) and seems to be confused between “light hearted crime comedy” and “cheesy kids flick”.

    If anybody wants to take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s02QMcbCD2w

  39. Completely anecdotally: Walking out of Reservoir Dogs, it occurred to me it was basically a movie I’d watch with my Dad on Sunday afternoons. So I called him and sold it as such

    “Yeah, it’s one of those movies that’s a tough guy contest for two-hours, like The Split. Y’know, group of hard-guys get together to pull a job, normal complications happen, then it’s just series of scenes of them trying to out hard-guy each other”

    After he saw it, he concurred that’s exactly what it was. Although, he was bummed that it’s implied a car chase happened, but you don’t see it. And he hated the constant soundtrack of shitty ’70s pop hits (which thinking back, if I saw a tough guy contest movie today that had constant Britney Spears and Coldplay songs, I would think it was lame too)

  40. Guys, I have to go back and correct myself. Of course Brian Garfield did not write the screenplay for THE OUTFIT. John Flynn did that himself. I got my facts mixed up. Garfield did however write an interesting introduction to a re-issue of the novel, where he writers about his friendship with Westlake, their common fondness for the movie adaption, his involvement in a planned Parker movie with Charles Bronson, and Westlakes wish that they would make a series of films with Jack Palance. Interesting stuff.

  41. @Acid Burn, you don’t have to read the Parker books in order, but there is a subtle chronology to them that makes the entire read much more enjoyable and truly climaxes with Butcher’s Moon.
    They are very hard to find used because they have such high collector’s values, so you may be buying them new anyways. The University of Chicago press and editor Levi Stahl are responsible for a big part of the Parker resurgence with their lovely re-issue of all the books, so you can feel good about throwing them some coin.

  42. I recall liking Wahlberg well enough in the SPENSER movie, but I share the consensus that he lacks the gravitas to be the “Mr. Keyser Soze legendary stone cold-blooded motherfucker” this film wants to be. He may or may not be a dumb motherfucker, but he certainly is a dead-fish, no-charisma-having-motherfucker here. More broadly, I feel like a lot of the chemistry in this movie feels pretty forced, and Stanfield and Wahlberg don’t work for me as a pair (contrast that with Winston Duke and Wahlberg, who did work pretty well in SPENSER). I did like the violence and some of the quips, but this is no KISS KISS BANG BANG, THE OTHER GUYS, etc.

  43. I’m not sure what version of Charley Varrick that Miguel Hombre saw but it is certainly very different to the one that I originally saw at the Cinema.
    In that version, although clearly a coldly calculating, professional thief, Varrick is genuinely effected by his wife’s death, there is a small moment when he shows it before gently removing her wedding ring; he just doesn’t carry it around as angst for the rest of the film.
    He also has only one other non professional relationship with a woman that I can recall, The Outfit’s, John Vernon’s, secretary (played by Jack Lemmon’s wife, Felicia Farr).
    Varrick certainly doesn’t treat any woman in the way described, dispatching, beating, cheating and screwing his way through a number of them. If that description fits anybody it is closest to Joe Don Baker’s character although I think even he only does any of that to one woman (the brilliant Sheree North)

  44. Yeah, you’re right about that Mitch. As it happens I re-watched CHARLEY VARRICK last weekend, and Miguel might just have spliced together Matthau and Baker’s characters. The scene with Varrick’s wife is actually quite moving, and he treats his friend Jack’s wife in a (sort of) respectful way. But other than that, the movie feels a bit like a Parker story. Much like Marvin’s PRIME CUT, Mitchum’s THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE and Clint’s THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT.

  45. Memory is a weird thing – even though I’ve seen CHARLEY VARRICK a bunch of times (including once in 2023) I went back and watched it after reading Mitch’s comment, and boy howdy did I have things jumbled in my mind. Especially the wife’s death. I stand corrected. Maybe I’ve been reading to much Cormac McCarthy recently.

    Since writer Brain Garfield was mentioned in a post – he’s got a connection to Matthau via another great, little seen film – HOPSCOTCH. Matthau plays a CIA operative who grows enraged over mistreatment by office & hack political appointees so he quits and goes rogue – writing a tell all expose. Matthau spends the film quipping and outsmarting the various chasers from the multiple spy agencies he’s enraging, all with the help of his European lover played by the incredible Glenda Jackson. My more a straight forward chase/comedy – it kind of ends up actually feeling like a legitimate espionage movie in the end. It’s good fun.

  46. HOPSCOTCH is a good one. There are six Walter Matthau movies I tend to re-watch on a regular basis. CHARLIE VARRICK, THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, HOPSCOTCH, PIRATES and THE LITTLE DEVIL. Don’t care much for his most famous comedic roles. Brian Garfield named one of the characters in his novel “Parker Westlake”, as a hommage to his friend Donald E. The role was played by George Baker in the movie.

  47. I’m not big on the later things like GRUMPY OLD MEN, but I appreciate the early stuff like THE ODD COUPLE & ENSIGN PULVER etc. – I’ve seen them once type of movies. But I’m definitely in the arena of loving his more ‘serious’ roles etc. TAKING OF PELHAM ONE, TWO, THREE is another absolute banger, with an all timer classic score and cold monster performance from Robert Shaw. Matthau was just such a unique ‘type.’ Not leading man looks (but could be sexy and charming or a mischievous rascal.) I guess it was that he never made an effort to disguise his smarts – it was obvious he was the quickest fox in the room. He’s someone I wish I could have seen performing live theatre, which was really his first & true love.

    Speaking of theatre – I’m seeing the Keanu Reeves/Alex Winter ‘Waiting for Godot’ in November – anyone else gonna catch it?

  48. My attention got diverted by the Varrick thing earlier and I forgot say that I agree with Miguel Hombre’s take on Point Blank.

    I had voiced a very similar opinion to my brother only a couple of days ago about it being too deliberately “arty” for me to like it as a Parker film (although, in another director’s hands, I could see Marvin being perfect casting; Prime Cut does play into that).

    My brother likes the Mel Gibson iteration (he did watch Play Dirty but felt, much like Vern, that it missed the mark- no intended pun- both with Wahlberg and the ropiness of some of the effects); however I have been trying to get him to watch The Outfit, which, despite the name change to Macklin (not sure why that happened) i think is closest in tone to the books; also, it is, of course, directed by the criminally underrated John Flynn of Rolling Thunder fame and Out For Justice, one of Seagal’s best.

    Didn’t much care for the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, despite the quality in front of and behind the camera, but the original still stands up, for me. Love Matthau’s hangdog expression throughout the film; he looks like a Basset Hound

  49. despite the name change to Macklin (not sure why that happened)

    It was my understanding that while Westlake would sell rights to the books themselves, it was always stipulated the name “Parker” would not be used (which is why it did start to be used after his death)

  50. Westlake wouldn’t sell the tights to the name Parker unless they made a series of movies based on his books.

  51. Ok, that makes sense and clears up, for me, why Parker has been called Macklin, Porter, Walker and others that I can’t recall; thanks for the info.I

    Now, I have to admit, and I’m prepared for all the brickbats, that as much as I like The Outfit and the Parker books that I have read, I prefer Westlake to Stark and Dortmunder to Parker.

    Outrageous, I know but there are a good sprinkling of well written tough guy crime/noir type novels out there but very few books that make me actually laugh out loud; the Dortmunder books often do that, so, if I had to choose one version of Westlake -Stark, it would be Westlake. Fortunately I don’t have to do that so I can have cake AND eat it

  52. One should never take things for granted, but I hope that at least the good people on this sight understood that whne I wrote that Westlake “wouldn’t sell the tights” I meant rights. Can’t see that any of the actors mentioned above here would look good in tights. Except for Statham, maybe…

  53. @walkerp, that’s all very useful info, thank you! Didn’t realize they were that hot a commodity, and I’m never gonna regret paying full price for a good book.

  54. Staying far away from this one, as I consider the Parker series and character to be sacred texts, and I don’t want to be upset.

    But I had to thank Ben C above for the rec on the Stroby book. I just blasted through it in a day, and loved it. Definitely a loving homage to the Parker books. Looking forward to reading the rest now.

  55. Hellz yeah TJ, glad to hear it! The other 3 in that series are great too.

  56. It was fun enough for a streaming movie, but you could tell it had tonal issues—too much Shane Black quip for a true Parker adaptation. The lack of plot armor was definitely its saving grace.

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