I had a bit of a misadventure today. I decided to watch a movie that had
been mentioned by Robin in her suggested viewing post for this week:
Play Dirty. I went to my favourite torrent site and downloaded it but
was surprised to find that it was an old film I'd never heard of. It
wasn't until after I finished it, that the penny dropped: the film I
watched was released in 1969 but the one Robin had mentioned was brand
new and on Tubi. The Tubi version was the one I'd meant to watch! I then watched the 2025 version of Play Dirty.

Since I've now seen both versions, I thought I'd mention both of them in
this post.

The first thing to know is that the newer film is NOT a remake of the
older one; all they have in common is the same title and the fact that
endings are both somewhat unexpected.

Play Dirty (1969) stars Michael Caine as a British officer in North
Africa during WW2. Caine's character is a petroleum engineer which
perfectly fits the bill for a secret mission that the Brits want to
carry out: blow up a huge German fuel dump to deprive Rommel of
desperately needed supplies for his vehicles. He leads the team with the reluctant and occasional cooperation of another officer. The team is a hodgepodge of non-Brits aside from the two leaders. Two members of the
team were gay men, Arabs who were inordinately fond of each other,
something the surprised me. You just didn't see a lot of gay characters
in films in that era and Islam remains harshly opposed to homosexuality
to this day. Not all Arabs are Muslims so maybe these two were
Christian? Not that they were major characters in any case.

The team has a number of challenges along the way - they are driving
several hundred miles through the desert to get to the fuel dump - and eventually arrives at their destination. However, Montgomery's advance
is going much better than expected and now the Brits back at HQ want to preserve the fuel dump for Montgomery to use for his forces but the
team's radio is not receiving, which sets up the ending of the film. I
won't spoil that but want to point out that things don't go remotely the
way I would have expected for the surviving team members.


Play Dirty (2025) stars Theo Rossi, who you might remember as one of the
junior members of SAMCRO in Sons of Anarchy. He also co-wrote the script
of the movie. He's a dirty cop in Las Vegas, named Frank Grady, who
moonlights as an enforcer for a local gangster played by Ron Perlman
(who played his boss in Sons of Anarchy, at least until Jax took over).

The events of the film mostly take place in a single day. With Internal
Affairs about to arrest him for his crimes, Grady decides to collect the
money his (criminal) boss has been holding for him but has to agree to a challenging condition in order to collect: he has to kill the bosses of
all 4 of the rival gangs that are proving annoying for his boss. He sets
out to fulfill his final tasks and much gunfire and violence ensues. But
it's all for the love of his girlfriend who he literally wants to sail
off into the sunset with. Things take an unexpected turn at the end but
I won't spoil it.

Let me just say that neither film is particularly good but neither is a
massive insult to your intelligence either. If you just want to see a
watchable movie that has an ending that you don't see coming, then you
might enjoy either - or both - of these.

--
Rhino

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