Movie Review: Max Payne

It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote, "I loved the Max Payne games and I think the movie looks pretty good," yet it seems so much further away; like something a naïve and childlike version of myself might have said. I didn't expect "Max Payne" to be a great film but the trailer hinted at some ambitious photography and even a few choice action scenes.

In retrospect I should have known that the idea was flawed from the get-go. Consider that the Max Payne games were greatly influenced by film noir clichés and Hong Kong action movies. While the games aren't adaptations of any one film they are, more or less, video games that take the cinematic experience of a certain kind of film and translate it into gameplay. When you take that a step further and attempt to reverse-engineer it back into a film it just doesn't work. The Max Payne games operate almost at the level of parody because they involve so many film clichés, which only feel more egregious when put back into a film.

Like the game it's based on "Max Payne" weaves a tale of revenge as the grieving New York City cop Max (Mark Wahlberg) tries to unravel the mystery of his murdered wife and child. As Max tracks down the few remaining leads he has, he discovers a deeper conspiracy involving a corrupt pharmaceutical company, a military super-soldier program and Norse angelic hallucinations. The film moves quickly from plot point to plot point often with very little explanation or development and the end result is a rushed mish-mash of stilted dialogue and flat acting with the occasional blasé action scene.

To its credit, "Max Payne" follows the story of the first game more closely than I expected and there are a lot of references to the game throughout the film. Sometimes the camera is positioned behind Max recalling the viewpoint from the game, characters and settings from the game show up frequently and the audience is treated to several of Max's flashbacks and hallucinations. It's clear that writer Beau Thorne and director John Moore had the original Max Payne firmly in mind during production. I admire their diligence and respect of the source material but when I think back to playing Max Payne the story is not what comes to mind. The Max Payne games were all about action and the movie delivers almost none of those same thrills. It isn't until near the end of the film that the action comes anywhere close to the frenetic gun ballet that made the game so memorable and the scene ends just as it starts to get going.

Mark Wahlberg portrays Max as a man who's dead inside which, unfortunately, makes for an uninteresting performance. But then again, that's the character. He mopes through the early voice-over (another nod to the game) with a flat-tone delivery and spends the rest of the film fronting his best tough guy shtick. The supporting cast of Beau Bridges, Donal Logue and a whatever-happened-to appearance by Chris O'Donnell are all equally lifeless and forgettable. The standout, and I use that term loosely, is Mila Kunis as Mona Sax but her entire performance is about looking pretty. I always knew she was "TV pretty" but she comes off as "movie beautiful" in this film. Her Achilles heel appears to be her height. It's hard to take a character seriously as a guns-aplenty assassin when she's introduced surrounded by men who are towering over her.

In an attempt to find a silver lining I'll mention the cinematography by Jonathan Sela. Once again using the game as a template, Sela was able to capture the dirt and grit of Max's world while also giving the drug-induced hallucinations an ethereal and yet realistic look. "Max Payne" has a hefty amount of visual style portraying the New York underworld as seedy and wet with all of the color sucked out of it. Harsh lighting and falloff give the movie a purposeful noir look but it's not as stylized as something like "Sin City." As interesting as the film's aesthetic is, you know there's a problem with an action film when the most memorable thing is the cinematography.

There's really no way around it; "Max Payne" is a bad movie. The story never engages, the action never excites and the actors look like they'd rather be elsewhere. This is an action film based on an action game that chooses to rush through a story instead of focusing on gun battles. Even as a fan of both Max Payne games I found very little to like in this. There's something to be said for slavishly following the game's story but ultimately I'd have settled for following the game's action scenes and cutting the story to the bone. If you've never played a Max Payne game I can't imagine this film being enjoyable in any way and die-hard fans of the games will have to work to like it.