Movie Review 7: Max Payne - A Man with A Gun

Title: Max Payne

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Director: John Moore

Genre: Action, Thriller, Drama

For more than a month, I have waited for a movie that I am interested to watch. When I saw Max Payne in GSC website, I thought, “Finally, a worthy movie.” Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

Max Payne is a movie that is loosely based on a famous PC game with the same title. I did not play the game since I’m not interested in shooting games thus I take this movie as a standalone instead of game based movie. The movie is about a detective, Max Payne, whose family was brutally murdered in a break-in. He craved for vengeance and found that the death of his wife is not what it seemed.

Mark Wahlberg was given the cast of Max Payne. While a lot of die hard fans would say that Mark Wahlberg look nothing like Max Payne, I think that he managed to portray a character that is fighting his inner demons successfully. I don’t know why, but even though Mark Wahlberg was involved in a number of movies, I remembered his role most vividly in the movie called “The Big Hit”. I was a very old movie that I watched on Astro.

For a long while I had no idea what was happening in the movie. It was almost until 30 minutes later that I was able to piece together the pieces of information that the director flung at me throughout the movie. However, I was able to identify the ultimate boss early in the movie :P.

Since I did not play the PC game version of Max Payne, I found myself intrigued when there were actually monsters in the movie. However, a few more clues given by the director, I realized the truth. However, I was not really disappointed because in a way, the monsters were depicted nicely especially when a junkie/drug dealer was depicted as being pulled out of the building by a demon when he jumped out of it. During the climax when Max Payne had to fight of the ‘demons’ and humans, living in two worlds at the same time, I found it to be really mesmerizing too. Still, I think that if the demons were real, it would have been a much more addictive movie… but then again, this is a fantasy / sci-fi fan talking.

I think that the director/writer was trying to act mysterious when they refer to things as secrets of Gods or army of Demon. I had no idea what they were talking about when a crime boss said “The Devil is building his army. Max Payne is looking for something that God wants to stay hidden. That is what makes him dangerous.” This statement just came out of nowhere as if they just try to force this sentence into their conversation!

The game Max Payne is famous for its bullet-time effect too. If I remembered correctly, there were only two such moments in the movie. The scene where he shoot his shotgun while bending over in bullet-time was hilarious. I don't know why, but I had a really hard time to keep myself from bursting into laughter when watching that scene. Maybe you should watch it first and tell me why it was so funny. Unlike the game, there were also not much shooting scenes, which I didn't really mind. I mean, you can't really have a movie that have gunfights right from the beginning till the end, can you?

In conclusion, I find myself deeply dissatisfied with the movie. While not exactly disastrous, it is nevertheless one of those forgettable movies that we keep in our subconscious mind after we watched them. The movie makers were clearly leaving their options open for a second episode, but chances are they will not do so unless they managed to have a makeover for the movie.

Observation: How did Max Payne manage to get to the top of the building when the crime boss told his lackey to bomb the stairs to cut off Max Payne?

Bottomline: Forgettable

Bamboo Ranking: 3.0 / 5.0