Movie review: 'Max Payne'

Mark Wahlberg (Credit: Michael Gibson/20th Century Fox)

Photos:

1 star (out of four)

“Max Payne” offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster—it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie—is the presence of Mark Wahlberg, who really ought to line himself up a good project soon, to mitigate the grief inflicted by “The Happening” and now this joyless, joystickless adaptation of the 2001  video game.

I admit it: If an action film strains to impress an audience, over and over, with slow-motion first-person   kill shots, I am not likely to be impressed. But even the target demographic for “Max Payne,” the ones who spent untold hours working their way through the game, may well resist director John Moore’s film. It’s sluggish as well as hard on the eyes (interiors and exteriors share the same hot, flat, blue-gray schmutzy  lighting—stylized in the least imaginative ways). “I don’t believe in heaven,” Wahlberg says in voice-over in the opening seconds, audibly scowling the scowl he wears throughout. “I believe in pain.” Let the games begin!

The plot is essentially a series of “rooms” to be entered so that Payne can lock, load, kill and relock and reload and kill again, and then go back to searching for the scumbag who murdered his wife and daughter. The back story relates to a military experiment gone wrong (first time in the history of cinema!) involving a bright blue liquid drug, Valkyrie, which gives the user/instant addict the sensation of invincibility and the fierce fighting spirit of the meanest Norse mythological gods around. “Max Payne” climaxes with Wahlberg taking the drug   in order to clean up the mess and take out the trash, and the message is pretty simple: Cool drug, no? Honestly, you find yourself rooting against Payne’s survival, even with a good actor in the hollow role. There’s nothing inside the film’s sour, slovenly spirit of vengeance. It’s as not-there as the fake digital snow falling all over Manhattan.

Initially, “Max Payne” was   rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. Director Moore, whose film may be more dull than offensive but is offensive nonetheless, won the appeal, and presto: PG-13, and now 8-year-olds can check it out, or else wait for the “gamer dedicated cut” (hard R, most likely) due in a few months on DVD. “I’m surprised we eventually did get away with what we did get away with,” Moore told gamedaily.com  Meantime, “Rachel Getting Married”  snags an R for a handful of harsh words. The clowns at the MPAA continue to put the bull in “double standard.”

mjphillips@tribune.com

Add a comment