Max Payne

MAX PAYNE (2008) - Oct. 18, 2008
Wow. It takes some serious incompetence to take a game as exciting and fun as Max Payne and turn it into something so dull and dreary. This film strikes all the wrong notes pretty much right from the get-go, with Mark Wahlberg essentially playing the most cliched gritty cop imaginable, and with anything even remotely resembling fun being tossed out the window in favour of a convoluted mystery. The movie also all-but-abandons Max Payne's signature gunplay (ie. the thing that actually made Max Payne worthwhile in the first place), with no action at all until the third act -- at which point it's almost impossible to care, even if the action had been decent (it isn't). The film is decently acted and features competent, if somewhat uninspired direction (though the essentially monochromatic cinematography gets a bit tiresome after a while). It does seem pretty clear that most of this film's problems can be attributed to Beau Thorne's turkey of a screenplay. Boo-urns. *1/2