Max-imum Payne - Minimal Interest (Max Payne (DVD))

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	Max Payne (DVD)
Date:	27/07/09 (143 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Occasional moments of excitement and a nice look and feel

Disadvantages: Boring, tired plot, uninspiring character, a waste of Mark Wahlberg and generally pointless effort

A review of just the film, this is a movie adaptation of the acclaimed computer game. The region 2 DVD was released in April 2009 but is already plummeting in price.

Consigned to working on unsolved case files, police detective Max Payne is a man haunted by his tragic past. Years earlier, he arrived home evening to find his wife and child murdered, with one of the assailants escaping through a window before he could be apprehended. Since then, Payne has devoted his energy to trying to bring to justice the man who murdered his family. When he is given a new lead, he goes to a former snitch's drug-fuelled party, where he meets up with a beautiful young girl. The next morning, the girl is found murdered and Payne's former partner Alex tries to warn him that the homicide team is trying to link Payne to the crime. But when Alex stumbles across some startling new evidence, he is silenced before he can share the information with Payne, catalysing a disturbing new path of discovery....

It's not hard to understand why Hollywood insists on investing in mediocre adaptations of well-known computer games. Faced with an unknown pitch versus a rubbish idea that at least capitalises on a commercial success, the studios are nearly always going to go for the latter, leaving the movie-going public to endure one shoddy game-to-film production after another. I've never actually played Max Payne (I'm not a huge game player outside the world of Mario) and comparisons between this and the source material are therefore not really very fair, but I know a turkey when I see one and this one was gobbling away within minutes of the opening titles.

It suffers from many shortcomings. For starters, there's nothing particularly interesting about the lead character. We learn about Payne's past, for sure, but it's hardly the most inventive or original back story of all time and the movie market seems saturated with brooding cops whose families have been murdered. Payne's manifestation on screen is hardly very inspiring, either. I haven't even played Max Payne, and even I have some knowledge of those iconic images that graced the cover of the game. Instead, here we have Mark Wahlberg in an entirely unmemorable portrayal of somebody who could be just about anybody. Indeed, I'm now almost curious to go and play Max Payne to find out what makes him such a revered character.

It doesn't feel like an adaptation of anything. Occasionally, the director (John Moore, Flight of the Phoenix, The Omen remake) tries his hand at something 'game-like' and seems to succeed. So there are occasional camera shots of Max facing down a gun barrel, or circling rapidly around the room looking for incoming adversaries. But otherwise, it's like a badly-done John Woo action film, with a barely coherent script trying to string together badly co-ordinated action scenes. A shoot out in an office building, for example, is completely tiresome. The director seems to think that having the lead character run past a succession of glass windows in slow motion will look cool. It doesn't. It looks silly. It's patently obvious that the glass is being shattered by other means and it's an insult to the intelligence that a man who is basically just a cop is able to outrun a hail of bullets from a crack team of marksmen. Later on, it improves slightly in terms of visual style, but the plausibility never increases, with Payne seemingly able to avoid every bullet aimed in his direction whilst striking his target first time simultaneously.

The narrative reveals itself to be the most painfully obvious waste of time you can possibly imagine. Plucked from the 'Top 5 Reasons That People's Wives and Children Get Murdered', the eventual 'revelation' is about as surprising as the fact that your new boyfriend has two feet. It's almost an insult to the intelligence, comprising a short succession of twists that seem pretty obvious right from the beginning. The concept itself is incredibly tired and only a talented writer could put a new spin on the 'evil corporate entity'. It's rather telling, therefore, that this is the film debut for Beau Thorne, the screenwriter. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, the characterisation is predictable or incoherent and the pace lurches and stalls in an uncomfortable fashion. Seemingly unable to decide whether to go for an action film or something a little more supernatural, Thorne treads a clumsy path between the two, perilously ditching any coherent direction in favour of visual effects.

And it's the visual effects that are probably the film's only saving grace. Trying to re-create the film noir atmosphere of previous generations, Moore films the larger part of Max Payne in a moody, greyish filter that focuses on little significant bursts of colour. The city is dark, cold and oppressive, not unlike Frank Miller's Sin City, but the constant presence of a snow flurry lends things a rather seasonal quality that could almost turn this into a Christmas movie. Overall, it lacks the bleak atmospherics of Sin City and it does feel a little too much like Moore was trying to copy Miller's style (complete with bad guy atop rooftop scene) but overall it's still easy on the eye. It certainly doesn't have the edgy violence of Sin City et al. Scraping in with a 15-certificate, it's surprisingly tame given the subject matter.

It's not completely evident whether the cast suffers simply as a result of a bad script or a combination of this alongside weak performances. Mark Wahlberg's Max Payne is one of his least memorable performances to date, with Wahlberg's only real expression appearing to be boredom/disinterest, a feeling shared by the audience. Beau Bridges is excruciating as Payne's buddy of old, BB, and feels really out of place. BB's place in the scheme of things is assured from the outset but Bridges never really gives him any presence; it's like he just wandered onto the set. Mila Kunis is the closest to a love interest, reluctantly partnering up with Max when her sister is murdered, but the lack of rapport (and indeed shared screen time) between the two of them means that nothing ever really takes off. The only notable thing about Chris O'Donnell's appearance in the film is that he has suddenly aged, and whilst rapper Ludacris is reasonably convincing as an internal affairs investigator, he's just a bit too obvious to be believable. There's a sneaky little cameo from Nelly Furtado too, as a widowed police wife, but it's only worthy of a mention for trivia fans.

Like most (or should that be all) game adaptations for the big screen, you just can't help concluding a viewing with a big heavy sigh. Not only do you know that you're just not going to get that hour and forty minutes back again, but you start thinking of all the other things you could have done with an hour and forty minutes, notably playing the original game, which would almost certainly have been more inspiring than this old clag.

Not recommended.

Summary: Another rubbish game to movie adaptation