This crime caper doesn’t play fair.

The opening of “Play Dirty” looks and sounds like it wants to enter Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh territory with the thieves talking about how the game works. But then it starts to get hokey when a car chase ends up at a horse race track with CGI effects toying with our emotions. And I’m sure somebody either got the message from “The Cowboy and the Queen” about how horses don’t deserve to be mistreated on film, or they already knew that before hand.

This is also the latest vehicle starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Shane Black, but it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. In fact, it all feels flimsy and mean-spirited, and relies on too many CGI effects with car and train crashes, and it might even look comical when people are thrown off them.

The thieves include the leaders Parker (Wahlberg) and Philly (Thomas Jane), who both know how their heists are supposed to play off, and the getaway car driver Zen (Rose Salazar), who betrays nearly the whole group by shooting them dead and taking the money. “Nearly,” because Parker survives after getting shot and falling into a river. Of course he’s going to survive that. Wahlberg’s the star of the movie.

Parker tries to make things right with Philly’s widow (Gretchen Mol) by turning to the thief and struggling playwright and actor Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield) for help in getting revenge. But the two men are forced to team up with the bad girl for a major heist regarding stolen treasure, a corrupt foreign politician, and the U.N.

We also get Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering as a couple whom the thieves need for their heist, and they have to disguise themselves as MTA workers because it involves a train. And plus, Tony Shalhoub comes in as a crime boss who warns Parker to stay out of his territory. His crime syndicate must also retrieve the treasure for the corrupt politician, and he even tries to screw the thief over.

Wahlberg has played a thief before in “The Italian Job,” but that was a stylish, comical, and entertaining movie that knew the genres wisely and had characters worth rooting for. Here, he shoots Mark Cuban in a restaurant and inadvertently breaks into people’s homes, and not one news report or cop tries to bring him down. It probably would have been cliched if they did.

Stanfield has some style and energy, especially when a poster says: “The End,” and he responds: “The End, Motherf***er.” It’s like he trying to go for that young Samuel L. Jackson approach without much condensation. But he doesn’t have much character development, as if the movie was more interested in trying to change our views on the Salazar character by having her scenes with Wahlberg. Her character murdered his team, and yet, she acts like an action hero and a femme fatale, but at least the lead isn’t stupid to fall for anything.

I almost forgot to mention that “Play Dirty” is based on the book series by Donald E. Westlake, under the pen name Richard Stark. And there have been many actors to portray Parker like Lee Marvin (“Point Blank”), Robert Duvall (“The Outfit”), Mel Gibson (“Payback”), and Jason Statham (“Parker”). Wahlberg should be the actor to portray him and he tries to take the role seriously, but the movie doesn’t handle him very well. It’s all overblown with the action and characters, and you can tell that when certain things happen to a certain treasure, there is always a loophole. That’s when it goes for that Soderbergh approach, but it’s a little late to go full nostalgic on that.

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