Max Payne

2/4 stars

How silly of me to think that as a gamer, my intelligence could be respected for 100 minutes straight by Hollywood. You see, Max Payne was a video game released in 2001, one of the first to utilize the "bullet time" concept seen in The Matrix and convert it to a playable experience. More importantly though, at its best, the game was a moody and atmospheric foray into gritty pulp storytelling that used characters' affected perceptions of reality to explore questions of genre and medium. Non-gamers will scoff (then again, at this date, some might not) but if I were reviewing a movie worthy of that game today, I might be giving it four stars.

The disturbing part is that Max Payne (the film) starts off so well. Aesthetically, it's almost dead on. Appropriately, it borrows heavily from The Matrix, and the result is smooth yet textured neo-noir. Mark Wahlberg himself doesn't characterize the motor-mouthed Hammett wannabe that the game provided, but he does alright at creating a new take on the character. Mila Kunis on the other hand plays Mona Sax as though... well, as though she actually played and liked the game, at least (When did Mila Kunis become so fucking good? She actually sort of steals the movie.) and several other actors turn in reasonably flavorful performances. The first hour of Max Payne is patient, intricate and mysterious.

However, when the film reaches its climax, it seems as though someone remembered that they were contractually obligated to deliver a brainless demolition derby to the video game players. We only like skilled genre exercises for the aesthetics anyway, when it comes down to it, we probably want action above all else, and anything we might need to use our heads to work out is swept under a rug easily enough... Right? It's a massive disappointment considering that the film has spent an hour by this time painstakingly setting up characters, clues and questions that are never resolved. Max gets high (perhaps the audience was expected to keep up) and the film never indulges in another coherent thought.

Various points in Max Payne stand out favorably in my memory. The camera lingering on the mouth of a soldier, which turns upward into a disturbingly gleeful smile as he describes the wonder drug that has made him a perfect killing machine. Police cruisers rolling through unplowed snow in the dead of the winter night. A femme fatale slipping out of her clothes in an attempt to evade a question she doesn't want to answer. What I wonder is, how did these moments come from the same filmmaker who gave us this disjointed, insulting climax? Max Payne feels like it was once a fine film, but was the victim of a profit driven editor and a set of unfortunately low expectations.