Max Payne Movie Review: Feeling No Payne
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.
