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.

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.

Good thing I got in free.