A stylish and occasionally rousing video game adaptation, John Moore’s Max Payne is surprisingly effective most of the way but ultimately falls prey to genre clichés and lapses of logic.
I don’t know if video game fans have ever been truly satisfied by a motion picture adaptation – an interactive experience that you can spend hundreds of hours immersed in doesn’t make for an easy transition to a cinematic genre spearheaded by the likes of Uwe Boll – but Max Payne comes closer than most.
Mark Wahlberg stars as the titular character, a New York cop working as a file clerk in a cold case unit: three years after the murder of his wife and child, he’s still trying to track down those responsible. He runs into Natasha Sax (Olga Kurylenko) while looking for leads; when Natasha is promptly murdered after leaving his place, Max is left to deal with internal affairs agents and Natasha’s sister Mona (Mila Kunis), some kind of Russian Mafioso.
After determining that those responsible for Natasha’s murder and the murder of Max’s family are one in the same, Max and Mona team up, and after navigating through a needlessly complicated conspiracy, focus their attention on the evil mega-corporation that used to employ Max’s wife. It’s a good thing that this isn’t a mystery, ‘cause, well, isn’t that the first place he shoulda looked?
No, Max Payne is mostly an action movie, and it does what it does and does it (mostly) well. The style here is lifted from Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City, with bits and pieces culled from other influential films; while lacking originality, the film is always visually interesting, creating a noirish NYC where it’s always snowing and the flakes are as big as your eye.
The film also makes use of frequent slow-motion effects, which are the best of their kind in this post-Matrix bullet-time world, employed to elevate tension and show us things we couldn’t usually see, instead of just showing us something ‘cool’; I was reminded of that old National Geographic program with the exploding apples and ultra slo-mo water droplets, where every tiny movement revealed something new and interesting.
Ultimately, though, there’s too much exposition here, about genre conventions that need little explanation, including an addictive super soldier serum that turns people into raving lunatics, and the inside workings of the evil mega-corp, whose evil needs no further explanation after the casting of Beau Bridges and Chris O’Donnell (who seems to have morphed into Jason Bateman) as employees.
Wahlberg is fine as our B-movie hero; Kunis, however, feels out of place. I wish she had switched roles with Kurylenko, as feisty and energetic in her limited screen time here as she was in last year’s Hitman (also based on a video game). Amaury Nolasco is effectively menacing as the (mostly) silent killer Lupino.
Film is director Moore’s most accomplished work, although that isn’t saying much. It’s a shade or two above Xavier Gens’ Hitman and on the same level as something like Constantine; though that film was seen as a disappointment respective to its comic-book genre, Max Payne is one of the better films in its own disreputable genre.
But there’s no shortage of artistry and imagination in the video game industry, and there’s no reason why the right games shouldn’t make great movies; early failures and predilection to hand over rights to filmmakers like Boll and Paul W. S. Anderson has landed the genre squarely in purgatory.
