"Max Payne" Review - Written by Dr. Royce Clemens

MAX PAYNE
*1/2 out of 4
Rated PG-13
Directed by John Moore

Saying that big-screen adaptations of video games don’t have the best track record in the world is one of the bigger understatements you could possibly make. Now I’ll mount a case for the SILENT HILL movie and will even admit to liking DOOM in the same way a lot of folks like PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE, but the reputation video game movies have is completely and totally deserved.

Which is completely and totally mystifying to me because there’s a two-step plan to making good ones. The first, and most important, is that you have to adapt games that have actual stories to them. How otherwise reasonable people thought that they could get three-act structures out of SUPER MARIO BROS. and HOUSE OF THE DEAD is something they’ll have to explain to their therapists because no one else knows.

MAX PAYNE actually gets this step right. I’ve played the game more times than I can count and it was such a landmark in my growth as a casual gamer that I used a quote from its sequel, THE FALL OF MAX PAYNE, as an opener for my review of (of all movies) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN on my myspace blog.

But unfortunately, it fails the second step, which is that you must have true believers behind the camera. People who played the game, fell in love with it, and want to make a kickass movie version. Not people who were paid to play the game or (and I hope to God this isn’t the case) just looked at the game’s wikipedia page and stopped there. Because handing MAX PAYNE to a first-time screenwriter like Beau Thorne and a journeyman hack like John Moore (BEHIND ENEMY LINES and the OMEN remake) is like handing this third BATMAN film to Garry Fucking Marshall. I’ve seen worse films this year, but MAX PAYNE edges out INDIANA JONES and DIARY OF THE DEAD as the biggest heartbreaker of 2008.

Mark Wahlberg plays Payne, an officer in the NYPD Cold Case department whose wife and child were killed three years prior. A new break in the case has something to do with a street-drug called Valkyr, which make folks super-strong and hallucinate giant winged beasts.

The drug also has connections to the shadowy Aesir Corporation, where Max’s late wife worked. This is handled ineptly, as the first time we see someone inject Valkyr into their veins, we see the Aesir logo right there on the vial! At about the forty minute mark, when Payne puts two and two together about something we’ve known since five minutes after the lights in the theater went down, we marvel at how Payne can even feed himself, let alone solve a high-reaching murder case.

Mila Kunis also features as… Well, I don’t know what purpose she serves. In the movie OR in real life. Seriously, she shouldn’t be doing anything other than asking us whether we want fries with that.

Payne becomes an automaton, mowing through bad guy after bad guy in one dull shoot-out after another. And near the end, Payne is forced to inject Valkyr himself, and lo-and-behold, he becomes even more of a bullet-proof Superman than he has been. Granted, that’s how video games and action movies work, but that isn’t how MAX PAYNE the game went. Payne was an extraordinarily well-developed character, racked with guilt and self-loathing. He didn’t win out because he started shooting up (which seems ass-backwards in the face of the fact that Moore fought hard to bring this flick in at a PG-13). He won out because he was too angry to die. Because he was meaner than everyone else. The fact that a game from eight years ago has more heart and more soul than flesh-and-blood people is nothing short of a fucking embarrassment.

A lot of this has to do with Mark Wahlberg as the lead. Nothing is required of Wahlberg here than to put his “Angry Face” on for two hours and grunt. Wahlberg is so lacking in charisma that we long for the days where he talked to potted plants and ran from the wind. I’ve played MAX PAYNE. I knew Max Payne. Max Payne was a friend of mine. And YOU, Mister Wahlberg, are no Max Payne.

Now say Hi to your mother for me.

I’ve made it abundantly clear that I have past connections with this property. Because I have them and you may not, you may like this picture more than I do. Though what with the 17% on the Tomatometer, I find that highly-fucking-unlikely. The biggest and best chance so far at making a video game movie that a simple majority of folks will like has been shot in the foot…In slow-motion… With angels flying around for no apparent reason.

And yet, even now, there is hope. Truth be told, I’m actually ROOTING for video game movies because there are worse things a film can do than turn you on to something else. I’m all for cross-pollination. Mike Newell, who directed FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, DONNIE BRASCO and HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE is shooting PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. And Gore Verbinski of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN fame is doing an adaptation of BIOSHOCK. The redemption of an entire genre is in their hands now.

After that, it’s in God’s.