Friday
17Oct2008
Movie Review - 'Max Payne'
Friday, October 17, 2008 at 12:00AM | Max Payne
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, and Beau Bridges  |
For the first 20 or 30 minutes,
Max Payne is a refreshing, almost artistic
new wrinkle in action movies. Director
John Moore uses a muted color palette,
surrounds his actors with towering skyscrapers and art deco lettering, and lets
the shadows say as much as the dialogue. It is, boiled down, very efficient film
noir. Unfortunately, the appetizer is better than the main course, which, to
continue the analogy, simply has too many flavors on the plate.Moore discards what is most interesting about his take on this video game title, and allows it too become an overpopulated, poorly-paced potboiler thriller, and his hope that a big finish will save or even serve the film comes up well short of the mark.
Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is a New York police detective. For the past three years, he's been searching in vain for one of three men who murdered his wife and infant child. Two of the culprits never made it out of the house, but one escaped, and along with the memory of his fallen family, continues to haunt Payne. But as Payne gets closer to the truth, the larger the truth gets.
As for the film's connection to the video game, John Moore does find a little bit of redemption. He incorporates some of the nuances of the game - a ticking watch, a heartbeat, flashbacks - that will probably make fans happy. Of course, the storyline is a revision of the structure from the game, and that might upset some of the die-hards.
Mark Wahlberg makes a good anti-hero here, as he did in The Shooter. The quality of both films is roughly the same. If you don’t care that you have to sit through an hour of banal exposition so long as there’s plenty of gunfire at the end of the movie, then this is a serviceable, if not an overly involving action flick.
If you’re looking for any more than that, you might be disappointed, particularly if you like the first half-hour.
Reader Comments (2)
Thanks.
The inability to limit one's material, whether it be characters, scenes or plot, is a modern film-makers' disease. I'm not quite sure when it started but it certainly exploded with Peter Jackson.
Being a visually orientated film fan, I will still sit through Max Payne as I think it has a very nice look to it.
i suspect the storyline for Max Payne is a lot more exciting when it's happening in the form of a video game... except for those few exciting parts that i already saw in the preview, it was a snoozefest