Movie Review Max Payne

Max Payne (2008)

Directed by John Moore

Written by Beau Thorne

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Olga Kurylenko, Mila Kunis

Release Date October 17th, 2008

Published October 17th, 2008

Is it cynical to assume that studios only make movies out of video games because of the built in audience? No, nothing is too cynical when it comes to movie studios. The real question is: How do the studios get filmmakers to go along with a movie that is little more than a marketing ploy? You could ask director John Moore. He is the man behind the latest video game adaptation to hit video store shelves. Moore and writer Beau Thorne have taken the characters of the popular first person shooter game Max Payne and used the character names and changed just about everything else that fans of the game knew.

Moore and Thorne have made a movie with characters named Max Payne and Mona Sax but if they resemble anything from the videogame it is merely a coincidence. Since that is the case, then why waste money on the rights to the game. Was that just for the name Max Payne?

Mark Wahlberg plays the titular Max, a cop tortured by the murders of his wife and daughter. They were alleged to have died in a robbery but Max comes to suspect a more sinister motive.  He's become so consumed by the conspiracy that his career has stalled. He now works in the Cold Case department, a bad assignment we assume because his office is located in the basement of the precinct.

The story kicks in when Max gets a tip from an informant about some dopeheads. He finds them and they lead him to a party and to a girl with a tattoo that is a big clue. The girl (Olga Kurylenko) is linked to a major drug dealer (Amaury Nolasco) who may be the man who really killed Max's wife. Before Max can get anything from the girl she is murdered. Since she happened to have stolen Max's wallet and was carrying it when she was killed, he is the top suspect.

More bodies pile up, each with a link to Max. As he avoids the cops he befriends the dead girl's sister, Mona (Mila Kunis), a killer for hire. Together they hunt down the drug dealer and his supplier. The plot involves a corporate conspiracy, drugs, super soldiers and other such things, many of them actually taken from the video game. However, fans of Max Payne looking for anything to be what they remember of the game will be sorely disappointed.

The 'adaptation' was merely a ploy by 20th Century Fox to find a property with built in salability. It never really mattered that the writer and director were in no way bound to actually adapt a story people were already quite familiar with. What mattered was the name Max Payne.

Now, as someone who never played the game, I could not really care less. The efficacy of video games to movies will affect fans of the game. For me, the issues are different. Max Payne, to me is a dreary action spectacle of dull anarchic plotting and lame attempts to marry classic detective movie tropes to modern special effects driven madness.

I like Mark Wahlberg but with The Happening and now Max Payne, Wahlberg is devolving from promising star to victim of bad management and bad advice. His Max Payne is a slow witted, lumbering piece of meat with a gun in his hands. On top of that, he's also a major bummer.

That last thing isn't his fault, I might not be alot of fun if my wife were murdered by drug dealing corporate conspirators but you wouldn't want to watch a movie about me either. The script of Max Payne piles on the depressive Max by killing his family and friends and then director John Moore piles on an oppressive atmosphere of unending cold darkness.

There are allusions to Norse mythology, lifted from the videogame but also altered from what gamers remember. The allusions are supposed to give the movie (game) depth but they really just show how shallow the whole enterprise is. The depth is feigned to the point of apathy and you almost feel sorry for whoever thought such a gambit would work.

Really, I almost feel sorry for everyone involved in Max Payne. I'm not sure what they set out to accomplish but still their failure is evident. Max Payne is a dreary, ugly, dumb movie that exists because of it's built in marketability and loyal following. Whether satisfying that built in following ever mattered is a question for director John Moore or 20th Century Fox.

My guess is, Nah.