.5/5 stars
I had so much hope, I really did. I dreamed of a world where video games could be adapted into compelling, thoughtful cinema. But clearly that is in some distant, future time, so for now we deal with the detritus that is Max Payne.
Based on the groundbreaking video game of the same name, Max Payne stars Mark Wahlberg as the titular character, a detective seeking revenge for the murder of his wife and infant son.
In a very real way, there is almost nothing that I do not hate about this movie, so let’s get what I like out of the way. The snow effects look pretty. Nelly Furtado’s brief cameo is the only solid performance and character. Mark Wahlberg does a fairly good scene in a subway station at the beginning.
Now that that’s out of the way: hatred.
There are no characters in this film. Oh sure, there are actors delivering lines and pretending to be other people, but sympathetic, developed fictional entities? No. Max comes off as the shoot-first-ask-questions-never-type, but in fact he’s just some schmuck who occasionally shoots people and acts very angsty, more a sociopath than anti-hero.
A potential love interest in femme fatale Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) goes wasted when she turns out as tight-lipped as our lead and about as human as a turnip.
Most of the other characters in the movie just show up to narrate things to Max, presumably so he won’t get confused, and then get shot.
Every plot point is telegraphed early on, which leaves no room for surprising twists and turns. The film frequently insists that serial killer Lupino is the main bad guy, though we know he isn’t, and we’re forced to slog through scene after scene of him standing around and grinning mischievously. One wonders where drug lords find all this extra time to hang around dark alleys and just look evil for evil’s sake. Then again the plot has about as many holes as our economic bailout (oh no he didn’t!) and should not at any point be taken seriously.
To be honest, I don’t care whether adaptations closely follow the original. If you can change some things along the way and still tell a good story, then that’s what counts. But when your source material is a game based entirely around shooting a whole lot of people, and your movie has almost nobody getting shot, you’ve done something wrong. The painkillers that Max took in the game, the ones that slowed his perception of time and facilitated even cooler shootouts, are gone. And with it the faceted hypocrisy of Max’s character, a cop who coldly murders drug addicts and is himself a substance abuser. It’s a perfect, simple plot device that was excised for reasons exceeding human comprehension.
Max Payne should play in every theater everywhere for the next six months so that people can understand how fully, truly bad it is. Once they do, no right-minded society would ever let something like this happen again.
