Max Payne
- Year:2008
- Rating:MA
- Director:John Moore
- Cast:Beau Bridges, Mila Kunis, Chris O'Donnell, Mark Wahlberg
- Release Date:October 16, 2008
- Distributor:20th Century Fox
- Running time:100 minutes
- Film Worth:$2.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
"There simply has yet to be a decent film adapted from a video game."
Irish filmmaker John Moore cut his chops directing commercials before his debut actioner Behind Enemy Lines in 2001. A largely unremarkable run of remakes (Flight of the Phoenix, The Omen) failed to spark at the box office and this latest offering sees him trying for the teen gamer market, tackling the game-to-screen genre.
New York cop Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is relegated to the cold case department of NYPD after a meltdown that followed the unsolved brutal slayings of his wife and young child. Since then he's busied himself with extra curricular investigations in order to find the killers. His obsessive quest inadvertently finds Max suspected of the killing of a young woman and it's only when teaming with the slain girl's hard-ass Russian mobster sister Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) that its connection with his own family's murder comes to light. Max then has to beat the clock in order to find the real killers before he's arrested himself.
There simply has yet to be a decent film adapted from a video game. Why studios persist is a testament to the lobotomised throngs who encourage them by paying to see this type of gleet. Muddled, badly written and totally uninvolving, Max Payne is a misfire from its opening shot. Wahlberg's wasted, reduced to a gravely voiced low-talker with a permanently furrowed brow and the miscast Kunis emanates about as much menace as a care bear. The plot is virtually incoherent for the first two acts and when the frenzied action finally does arrive, it's over in a matter of moments and the film implodes, as its uber-noir stylistics and faux-supernatural atmosphere crush the vacuum created by its evaporated plot.
