Max Payne Movie Review: Feeling No Payne
by Justin Arnold on October 21, 2008 at 4:05 pm
If you’re a gamer, this movie will be especially painful to watch. My hope going in, was that the movie adaptation of the Max Payne video game would be full of Payne … and it was, just not the kind I had hoped for.
Following in the sordid footsteps of video game to movie adaptations is the recently released Max Payne. Staring the talented Mark Wahlberg (I Heart Huckabees, The Perfect Storm, The Departed) and a cast of talented actors, this film feels like it makes an attempt to render the intellectual property into something that non-gamers (also see: cretins) will understand.
Sadly, their attempt falls flat and turns the movie into nightmarish gibberish usually reserved for Subway employees, Republican Vice-Presidential candidates, and the functionally retarded.
As a fan of the game series, I went into this movie skeptical. I had read an interview with the developers at Remedy who said about the movie, and I’m paraphrasing, “What the fuck?” Evidently developers watched the movie at a special screening and didn’t even recognize their beloved title.
The plot is more or less preserved; characters are present with a few extras as are the major plot elements, but I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t watching the Max Payne I had struggled with on “Dead on Arrival.”
The fact is that this movie was hamstrung by a PG-13 rating. However, Max Payne is not, repeat not, a PG-13 game. Max Payne is a gritty shooter in which there’s so many bullets flying it’s a wonder how you don’t get lead poisoning. The watered down Max Payne is so plainly cosmetic it renders the movie a nugatory pass at a genius game.
Director John Moore has taken a public shellacking from critics and game fans, making him a social leper. His Wikipedia entry was even defaced as an angry gamer wrote next to his Max Payne movie credit “ruined the movie…pg-13!? you and fox both blow you ‘cockgobblers’(i know you like that word you damn fag)”
Perhaps a tad unfair but that’s hardly the point. You can’t argue with the pull that hacks like Uwe Boll and Paul Anderson have had on the video game industry by creating adaptations that are so bitterly repugnant to their target audience that the very mention of their names makes even the most casual of gamers bleed from the nose and bite strangers on the face. Om nom nom nom nom.
There is a rumor that an unrated version will be released of Max Payne, but we’ll see. I know that for myself that after having seen this I doubt I will want to see it again with the promise of coitus or behavior modifying recreational pharmaceuticals.
What makes me the most utterly dejected is that you can tell from the production value that this movie had it all: a quality cast, a nice big budget, and a story that wrote itself – and Moore squandered it.
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- Did the ESRB Leak Max Payne 1 & 2 for the Xbox 360?
- Max Payne Movie Will “Make You Feel Like You ARE Max Payne”
- LOOK OUT! Leaked Max Payne 3 Teaser Shows Off Payne’s Sharp-Shooting
- Mark Wahlberg Injured by Unruly Wiimote
- Rockstar announces Max Payne 3
7 Comments » |
on October 22, 2008 12:59 am
I agree. I screened this last Wednesday and was horribly disappointed. There was just NO action in the movie. Granted, I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular, but I was expecting more action and gun slingin’ from this film.
Good thing I got in free.
on October 22, 2008 6:06 am
Hey man, did you even SEE the movie? There was tons of action that was off the hook, yo. Just like Entourage.
I know all my friends, especially Mr. Donkey apreciated how Max Payne represented the video game. Even if they had to play it with hooves.
Say hi to your mother for me.
on October 22, 2008 10:30 am
What kind of review is that? It didn’t have much action (or enough) and was rated PG-13. Besides that you’ve told us NOTHING. I’ve not seen it, so maybe it sucks but one wouldn’t know why it does or does not from reading that so called “review”.
on October 22, 2008 3:03 pm
Yeah Justin! Where is the plot! Give me a cinematic breakdown! Tell me how it starts, what happens in the middle, and for the LOVE OF GOD tell me how it ends!!!! Sheesh.
on October 24, 2008 8:33 pm
I’ll review it for ya, in reaaaaal short as I’m due for some drinking.
Max Payne is a terrible movie, for many reasons. Mark Whalberg looks lost throughout the whole movie. He doesn’t act so much as he goes through the motions. He doesn’t seem to particularly care, and I don’t blame him. The script is awful. The rest of the acting lacks any sort of energy and there is no real enthusiasm from anyone.
The character of Max Payne earns no love either. I never once felt any stirring of emotion for him. Sympathy, pity, awe, nothing. Payne goes through life looking for his wife’s killer with no concern for anything else in the world. Not his friends, not sexy ladies offering themselves to him, not even polite etiquette. Nope, he just punches people in the face whenever he decides he hasn’t found his wife yet. Which is the whole movie. Seriously, he was the least likable character I have ever seen. Ever. He’s so one dimensional you wonder why the other cops don’t kill him at he end instead of rescuing him. He’s a dick and doesn’t seem to know or even comprehend that there are other people in the world. I mean, I understand he’s this whole emo dark anti-hero, but he feels more like a cardboard cut out than anything. Ugh.
The action scenes are so poorly done that the people point the guns around like they’re toys, and Payne apparently has magical bullets that don’t need to be aimed, because he doesn’t point his gun at bad guys yet somehow manages to hit them between the eyes without looking. The action sequences are few and far between, and they generally lack any sort of action or direction other than slowing down the motion a little bit while people shoot guns. In no particular direction. Shit, a team of swat guys can’t hit one dude with a pistol? He even stands right in front of them for a few seconds. They must all be cross-eyed.
More than once I saw Payne or another character get the shit kicked out of them without so much as a bruise or a drop of blood in the immediate following scene. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The plot is slow and thick, and I figured it out a quarter of the way through. For some reason all these people have the same tattoo in the same place. There’s no discernible reason why they should all get the tattoo, but they have it, and it connects everyone in the movie. Deus Ex Machina, anyone?
Max Payne is a video game movie. That’s all you really need to know in the end. Slow, boring, poorly written and acted even worse, you should under no circumstances see this movie. Don’t encourage this sort of filth.
on October 24, 2008 8:36 pm
Hey Wade. Say hi to yah mutha for me.
on October 24, 2008 8:36 pm
Oh, and if you want the plot: Max is looking for the killer of his wife, and along the way he encounters a drug ring that uses a new psychadelic drug to make people trip balls and see Valkeries. These drug users all have the same tattoo linking them to a pharmasutical company that originally made the drug to create super soldiers, but it only works on 1% of users. Everyone else goes crazy. So Max tracks the clues to find his wife’s killer and kills him. End of story.