There are few genres I like less than the snarky violent action comedy. I didn’t care for it much in the ’80s (though “48 HRS.” is splendid popcorn), I liked it even less in the ’90s (though occasionally I would see something like “The Last Boy Scout” or “Rush Hour” that packed a disreputable wallop), and now that the genre has mostly been taken over by the streamers, it seems to have entered its weirdly postmodern and annoying convoluted cookie-cutter phase. But “Play Dirty,” directed and co-written by Shane Black (who wrote “Lethal Weapon” and the famously expensive script for “The Last Boy Scout”), is an action-comedy throwback powered by enough casual violence to inspire more grins and groans. Black, as a director, has made this retro action power cheese his brand, not always successfully (I think “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is cloying and overpraised; I really like “The Nice Guys”). But in this case he reminds you of why he’s good at it.

“Play Dirty” is made of standard-issue parts, but it casts Mark Wahlberg as Parker, the robber hero of 24 crime novels by Donald E. Westlake (all written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), and the film’s lethal pop-cutout version of Parker is enough of a borderline sociopath to hold our interest. Casual killings at point-blank range, vicious motorcycle jackings, tossing someone off a building, assassinating the actual Mark Cuban (playing himself) — this, in the movie, is what the good guys do. That it’s all set at Christmas is a bit of a tired joke (the whole “Die Hard” as Yuletide classic thing. Merry Christmas, motherfucker!), but every time you’re ready to give up on “Play Dirty,” it ups the body count in just the right holly jolly way. The movie can, at times, feel like a half-hearted “Ocean’s” sequel crossed with “National Treasure,” but there’s a what-the-hell-we’ll-kill-you nasty bite to it.

Most action comedies throw disparate elements into the blender to create a junk-movie smoothie: Here are some car chases, some patter, some sex, some gunplay, some formula plotting. But Shane Black approaches this mongrel of a commercial genre as if it were an art form. He’s trying to turn a dog-food recipe into haute cuisine. The film opens with Parker and his crew engaged in a horse-track robbery, holding everyone in the back office hostage as they enter the safe, and when the plan goes awry — a parking attendant thinks he’s going to rob the robbers — they wind up escaping in a car chase that spills out onto the track, resulting in an action dance of vehicles and horses and flying jockeys that evokes the insanity of the opening sequence of Brian De Palma’s “The Fury.”

Every bit as jolting is what occurs when they get back to the hideout with the loot. Zen (Rosa Salazar), a saboteur, reveals herself by stripping down to her undies and then whipping out a gun and killing everyone there (except for Parker, who can just about dodge a bullet). The flippancy with which these characters are made to bite the dust establishes the film’s combustible tone.

Wahlberg, still sleek at 54, and cool as a dozen cucumbers, comes on like the more natural version of what Tom Cruise tried to bring off (and never quite did, in my estimation) in the Jack Reacher films. He simply wasn’t cutthroat enough, but Wahlberg has never lost that stoic Boston B-boy glint. His Parker, who will kill you in a heartbeat, goes on the hunt for Zen, who was once part of a South American dictator’s elite guard unit, and when he locates her, the two join forces to bring off a heist (though he’s got his own reasons for entering into the partnership). They will steal the sunken treasure from a 15th-century Spanish galleon, notably the golden figurehead on the prow — a statue of the Lady of Arintero. Tony Shaloub, cast against type, is the dyspeptic corporate criminal who has himself arranged to steal the Lady and sell it to an “asshole billionaire” (Chukwudi Iwuji).

It’s locked in a security cage made of a tungsten/carbon alloy, which sounds just old-fashioned enough to have come out of the pre-tech ’80s. “Play Dirty” is an alloy too — a tongue-wagging/car-crash alloy that might feel every bit as old as the films it’s evoking if it weren’t for Shane Black’s attitude of nihilistic nonchalance. It’s there in the most tossed-off jokes, like when Keegan-Michael Key, as part of Parker’s new crew, turns the dial up on a console that controls a speeding subway train, saying, “We’re at 30 m.p.h…35 m.p.h…,” and Claire Lovering, as his partner in crime, says, “Stop saying m.p.h.”

It’s also there in the casual viciousness of the scene where Wahlberg and LaKeith Stanfield, as a criminal associate who’s so laidback he’s almost floating on air (until his anger explodes, at which point you need to duck for cover), try to get Shaloub’s sleazy bitcoin-obsessed assistant (Nat Wolff) to tell them where the Lady of Arintero is. Though they’ve got him at gunpoint, he’s literally too scared to tell them because he thinks they’re going to throw him off a building. (He’s right to be worried.) That extra dollop of destruction is what makes the film funny and gives it momentum.

How good/not good a movie is “Play Dirty”? Released by Amazon MGM, it’s 10 times better than your average Netflix action espionage caper, but it’s also an overloaded, functionally lit slab of action-heist formula on steroids. “The Nice Guys” was a more stylish Shane Black caper. Yet there’s something compelling about how Wahlberg’s Parker is less invested in the heist than he is in maintaining his lone-wolf status. I could easily sit through another installment of Wahlberg holding down the center of his own cut-rate “Mission: Irascible.”