Max Payne (*)

Directed By: John Moore
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunos, Beau Bridges, Ludacris, Amaury Nolasco, Olga Kurylenko
Seen: October 24th 2008

* Out of ****

What a colossal waste of my time. Max Payne starts off incredibly promising with scenes edited and filmed exactly as you remember the game being, but that is quickly replaced by a ridiculous attempt at film noir that makes you wish you’d rather rented Sin City for the evening.

Max is framed for the murder of Natasha Sax (Kurylenko) and this draws Mona Sax (Kunos) into the story, but she appears out of nowhere approximately two times during the entire film, and does not really offer anything apart from another fleeting throwback to the game that spawned this film. We then get the line thrown around claiming Max has pushed away everyone he ever came close to, blah, blah, blah, what a bag of borrowed tricks.

Jack Lupino (Nalasco, or Sucre from Prison Break) was an Army sergeant, but is becoming increasingly unstable and crazy due to addiction to the drug Valkyr, thus a perfect henchman-villain for the story.

Max continues to uncover the involvement of a big corporation, another throw-in from the game, Aesir Pharmaceuticals. Aesir developed Valkyr, which was supposed to make soldiers super-soldiers, but worked as planned in 1% of cases. All others would become increasingly unstable and crazy – remember Lupino? For those who still want to see the film, I won’t give any spoilers, but I will tell you that you can apparently go back into memories of old and see through walls, and in this fashion figure out who the real bad guy is. Something that would never have happened in the game does happen in the film, Max takes drugs, Valkyr to be specific, and what do you know? That 1% success rate? Max Payne to the rescue… (and now he can kick the bad guys’ asses)

I was excited to see Max Payne from what was done with the trailers, but the film itself is an unfortunate and complete failure. Pathetic.