Max Payne

This dreary faux-noir that puts Mark Wahlberg in the role of an anguished cop out for vengeance is painful to watch, but it's nothing an aspirin can't fix. Might as well save yourself the headache, though.

By Alex Markerson Oct 17, 2008 5:06 PMTags
Max PayneTwentieth Century Fox

Review in a Hurry: This dreary faux-noir that puts Mark Wahlberg in the role of an anguished cop out for vengeance is painful to watch, but it's nothing an aspirin can't fix. Might as well save yourself the headache, though.

The Bigger Picture: Cop on the edge though he may be, Max Payne kills more time than anything else. He's searching for one of the gunmen who murdered his wife and child—in gauzy flashback, naturally, so they might as well be cardboard cutouts—but the trail's gotten so cold he's pretty much down to interrogating people at random in the subway. But when he's implicated in a string of murders involving a new street drug and some not-even-half-baked nods to Norse mythology (!) it gets—oh, wait, it was always personal, what with the murdered family. It gets, uh, max personal.

You could easily get all the way through Max Payne without knowing it's based on a video game—but that's not a compliment. The source material was a cheesy but enjoyable pulp wrapper around slick Hong Kong-style gunplay. But director John Moore (The Omen 666) ditches the run-and-gun formula that might have been stupid but watchable, instead giving us a ponderous, moody backstory and long takes of Wahlberg looking sad and everyone else (Mila Kunis, Chris Bridges) trying to look tough. It doesn't work, especially since the secondary characters have even less depth than Payne.

The atmospherics are well-crafted—lots of precipitation, flitting shadows and mildly alarming hallucinations—but they have such a tenuous connection to the already threadbare, nonsensical plot that they're no more compelling than your average shoe commercial. And all the artful shafts of light in the world can't save Max Payne from the fact that nothing exciting happens in the movie.

If it were a game, you'd quit before you finished the first level—without even bothering to save.

The 180—a Second Opinion: You'd have to do some experimentation to enjoy this, really. With the sound off it could be a poor man's Blade Runner. And if you're a diehard fan of the games—if there are any—you're probably packing a portable game system that will come in mighty handy.