Max Payne (20th Century)
Rated PG-13 for violence including intense shooting sequences, drug content, some sexuality and brief strong language.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris O'Donnell, Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges, Amaury Nolasco, Donal Logue.
Written by Beau Thorne.
Directed by John Moore.
GRADE: D
REVIEW
By Dan MetcalfRemember the good old days, when great creative minds would come up with a compelling premise, write a script, and then a studio or production company would make a decent action film, and then an equally talented software developer would make a companion video game for the movie? Maybe there's a reason they made movies first and then the video game, because maybe, just maybe...it turns out that a good story is actually an important component of a good movie.
Max Payne, an action drama based on the video game by the same name is the latest evidence that video games are not good premises for movies.
Mark Wahlberg stars as the stoic Max Payne, a cop haunted by the murder of his wife and child. Since his wife's death, he spend his days stuck in the basement of the police station working on cold case paper work, but at night, he hunts for his wife's killer on the dark, wet streets of New York.
When Max get a lead on his search for the real killers via a beautiful Russian drug addict named Natasha, he discovers an underworld of people dependent on a blue serum. Natasha is killed, and her assassin sister Mona Sax, played by Mila Kunis, joins with max to find out the source of the blue serum.
Beau Bridges plays B.B., an old family friend of Max who works as head of security for a huge pharmaceutical company (oh-oh...could there be a connection to the blue serum?) who appears to be Max's only friend. The latest rapper-turned-actor Ludacris (billed as Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges) plays an internal affairs cop who's sure Max is up to something bad. Chris O'Donnell (remember him?) plays Jason Colvin, an inside man at the pharmaceutical company who knows all about the blue serum and it's connection the the death of the late Mrs. Payne and family. Oh, did I forget to mention that Max's wife also worked for the pharmaceutical company? Now it all makes sense, right?
I've played third and first person shooter RPG games, and I know their appeal. Many long all-nighters were spent trying desperately to get past hard levels, saving my progress, and looking up walk-throughs online for help. Some games take days, if not weeks to finish, depending on personal life issues and work schedules. While I've never played Max Payne, I can honestly say watching the movie version was just as exhausting as playing similar games.
Max Payne is one of those 'stylized violence' movies full of style, but little substance. It's full of all the stupid stunts one would expect from a movie based on a violent video game. It also has the obligatory 'Matrix moment', complete with a slow motion shower of bullets as the hero somehow dodges them all.
Wahlberg as Payne doesn't impress much and neither does anyone else, especially Mila Kunis as a bad-ass female assassin. It's a hard transistion from situation comedy to action heavy. But the real culprit in this bad movie is it's lame story, which apparently was just barely good enough for a video game and obviously not ready for the big screen. If you don't figure the obvious plot 20 minutes into the film, you should get your I.Q. tested and go back to college or something.
Here's an idea: Instead of paying 7 bucks to see
Max Payne, go rent
The Matrix, a creative and innovative action movie conceived
before it was a video game.
