Max Payne

An insipid and poorly written action movie trading on the popularity of a video game franchise.

God I would love to see that quoted on the DVD sleeve.

I'll clear this up right away so everyone knows where we stand. Max Payne 2 is one of my top 5 best games ever. But I'm not here to review the games, I'll leave that to people with better taste in hats than I, I'm here to review the movie.

It opens well, a nice film noir sort of feel, and uses a couple of nice effects that really help to set the tone. Then it quickly abandons these in favour of randomly changing between rain and snow. I'm not kidding, watch for it, on one occasion in particular we swap from a miserable downpour to snow piled high in the space of about 5 minutes movie world time (about 4 seconds real time). The schizophrenic weather conditions are truly laughable, more so when you notice that there's never any slush, just puddles or pristine white snow depending on the producer's mood.

I won't touch on how the movie has butchered the story of the first game because then you could call me on the bias issue, instead I will judge the story on it's own merits. Max Payne suffers from the rare condition known as Mansion Scene Syndrome, whereby a movie tries to cram too much plot into too short a time (named for the Da Vinci Code) except in this case they've tried to fit an entire game into an hour and 40 minutes.

When I say that they tried to fit the game into 100 minutes, I mean a very distilled version of the game that quite frankly left the whole experience confusing and unfulfilling like a sandwich made of ejaculate between two slices of damp bread.

At no point can you understand any of the characters' motivations, Mona Sax seems largely unfazed by the murder of her sister which is probably a good thing as Mona is almost completely superfluous to the plot. Bravura becomes convinced Max is a good guy and not a cop killer because of... well, gut instinct or something. Payne you are told constantly is an emotional wreck with a death wish but determined to first bring his family's killers to justice, and you can't help but feel that this is the movie makers trying to cover for the fact that Mark Wahlberg is a bad actor.

Plus at times you will suspect that Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges was very much aware of the fact that they changed Bravura from a white guy to make sure that they had a black guy in a prominent supporting role. Why does Hollywood still feel the need to throw in a token black guy? There are plenty of good black actors out there making good movies, why change an existing character just so you can parade him around on screen going "Hey, we're ok, we got one, look."?

I'm not quite sure what the point was with Rothaford Gray's scene in the opening, except to say that Max is an emotional wreck with a death wish but determined to first bring his family's killers to justice. The characters are ALL FUCKING TWO DIMENSIONAL and you couldn't care for any of them, not even Max.

The plot stumbles forward drunkenly before tripping over it's own feet and falling flat on it's face just in time for the big gunfight finale. Speaking of which, for the series defined by Bullet Time the movie thankfully keeps it to a scant few (and well executed) scenes, sadly these are also the only real action scenes in the movie.

I should say that the whole scene when Max takes the Valkyr and starts tripping is AWESOME, it is really well done. The effects of the Valkyr are well portrayed but I can't help but wonder why anyone would take a drug that incapacitates you with mortal fear. Though why do all the 'V' slogans sprayed over the walls still show a syringe (other than trying to copy the game) when the movie makers decided that Valkyr should be a tasty beverage so that they could get a lower rating from the MPAA?

My final point, why the fuck would you try to get a low rating on a movie that is based on a gritty and gruesome series? The games aren't meant for children, so why would you try to make the movie so?

And the musical score is crap.

I really, really wanted Max Payne to be good. I wanted a gritty film noir that captured the essence of the game, what I got was watery dross and a desire to seek a refund.

Rating: D