Max Payne: The fall of Max Payne

Initial rant

There’s something about videogame movies. They never turn out too good. In my opinion, there are two major reasons for this.

Hollywood doesn’t trust the original story. This seems strange to me, as the good games all have good stories, which the fans love. The movie-making industry however seems to think that they know better than the fans.

The director and others involved in the production both a) have never played the game(s) before adaptation, and b) work towards their own “vision” of the game, which never seems to be what the fans want. Please also refer to Point 1.

I have yet to see a ‘good’ videogame movie, and frankly I am beginning to think that the task of adaptation cannot be successful. It seems as though Hollywood just wants to bank on the good name of the game, and assume that the end product will rake in the green. What ends up on screen is usually something that only incorporates part of the game – usually a few characters, and few locations, and maybe one or two of key plot points. That’s about the it.

My question would be – why not just make a whole new movie? Why drag our classic characters through the mud in some misshapen hunk of a story, that doesn’t give them the opportunity to present themselves as they were in the game (e.g., unstoppable badasses)? What’s the point of having Max Payne in a movie, if the movie doesn’t represent Max Payne as he was, and doing what he did in the game?

I felt something similar with the X-Files movie. In that flick, it could have been anyone chasing down the bad guys. It didn’t have to be Mulder and Scully. Hollywood just thought they’d like to bump out something else and bank on the big X to deliver for them. I guess they earned some money for themselves, and that’s the important thing…

Max Payne

Onto the movie. First off, I should let you all in on a secret. I have never played either of the two Max Payne games. This gives me a unique perspective on the movie – I can judge it as a movie, without whining too much about what could or should have been (because I loved the game so much).

Second off, I know Mark Wahlberg can act. He can even act in action movies – e.g., the exceptionally good “The Big Hit.” It’s unfortunate to see that this movie doesn’t really allow Mark to do much acting. It’s even more unfortunately to see that this movie doesn’t allow Mark to do much of anything. There’s one word for this. Boring.

The movie starts out slowly. Fair enough. The movie keeps moving along slowly, weaving in some promise of some interesting supernatural elements. Fair enough. The movie keeps moving along slowly… I could keep going (along slowly) but I won’t. You get the idea.

To be honest, I think the most interesting part of the movie was seeing Mila Kunis as a badass Russian mob-missie*. I will never watch “That ‘70s Show” the same way again. From now on, I will always see her as Mona Sax, with an MP5 slung over her shoulder, and a bunch of 7-foot henchies at her back. However, Mona’s got even less to do in this movie than does Max. Just when you think she’s about to break through and get more involved in the story, she doesn’t, which is a shame, because she’s almost believable in the role.

There’s a lot of eye contact between Max and Mona if you look for it, and I think a lot of the time, I think they both might have one thing on their minds. And one thing only. “What the f*** are we doing here?”

Just out of curiosity, I also checked the good ol’ Wikipedia to find out what differences there were from the game in this movie. I expected to find that a lot of liberties had been taken with the story, and I was right. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these, nowhere could I find any mention of harpies being in the game. The fact that they called what are obviously harpies “valkyries” in the movie also didn’t rub me up too good. I know my Greek mythology, and those things are harpies my friends. Valkyries are (from memory) horse-riding shield-maidens from Sweden, and by all accounts they look pretty decent. Naming issues aside, I can’t work out why the hell these things were in the movie, or why people had their visions of them. It was very shoehorned, and from what I can tell, it came out of the screenwriter’s own mind, and not from the game. Oh well.

There’s a few other questions I’d like some answers too. I’d like to know what happened to the black guy who was transferred to the Cold Case section at the movie’s opening, and got the spiel about Max. What the hell was the point of this guy? Not to mention the bloke actually giving him the spiel. They just disappear into the exposition wilderness. I’d also like to know how many cops worked homicide at the 55^th precinct. See how many cops you can count in this one room as Max strolls past them to his ex-partner’s office. Lastly, a dude who’s been called “invincible” earlier in the movie goes down to one tiny handgun slug. O-K.

But by far, the most glaring problem with this movie is the lack of action. Max Payne is a pretty violent number – guns blazing all the time, against a s***-load of bad dudes. Apart from the office shootout (halfway through the movie) there appeared to be a distinct lack of shooters. Max’s shotgun skills are certainly impressive, but he’s finished all too quickly. Not to mention the climax on the helipad. This scene should be in Websters dictionary as the frickin’ definition of anti-climax.