Movie Review: Max Payne

I saw this movie last night and it was *incredibly* crappy. It seemed like an endlessly boring, long shot of falling soap flakes and dark New York streets. The movie was long, stupid, boring and had very little action in it.

The plot was the same sort of cop on a revenge kick that you have seen in countless movies but it was not fresh and there were no twists or cool shots to make it decent. Basically, Max Payne wants to find out who killed his wife and kid and blames his partner for not doing enough. Payne goes from one dark street filled with soap flakes to another and gets involved with some Russian babe played by Mila Kunis. I guess she is Russian mafia or something but her character is pretty much paper-thin and only has a motivation to get revenge on the person who killed her sister. They go through the motions investigating the crime and fight the bad buys at the end. The plot is thin and weak and the mystery is such a joke that you solved hours before the characters do.

All of the characters including Payne can be summed up by a caption like Russian Babe that wants revenge, or former cop now Head of Security at Phama corp., or dorky, bald, bad guy with goofy tattoos. They even put Marlo Stanfield from the Wire in the movie with a Jamaican accent in a total waste-of-time cameo. All-in-all there is absolutely no character building or opportunity for Wahlberg to show his acting chops. No one is memorable or cool and everyone is just pretty much forgettable.

I could have swallowed all of this if there had been some great action scenes throughout the movie. But Max Payne seemed to have about 10 minutes of action stuffed into its final act. There was a great set-piece gun battle between Max Payne and some Riot Police at the evil Pharmaceutical company but that pretty much did it. The battle between Payne and the dorky, bald baddie was an absolute joke. The action just seemed like the director said "whoops, this is an action movie so lets add a few scraps towards the end."

They even had the temerity set up a sequel with Max's family saying "Not Yet Max" to him wanting to die. I wished they just said "It's Time Max" and he finally keeled over dead so we wouldn't have to watch a followup to this dreck. I looked up the Director (John Moore) and screenwriter (Beau Thorne) so I can avoid their movies in the future. To sum it up this movie is just another example that video game movies (as opposed to comic book movies) are made to suck.