Too much Max, not enough Payne

By Joe Dwyer     10/23/08 7:00pm

Last Friday Max Payne, the movie adaptation of the video game of the same name, hit theaters. Overall, the movie is solid, but when critiqued as an action flick, it is like ordering a hot juicy steak and receiving a chicken salad.Mark Wahlberg (The Happening) stars as the titular character, an NYPD detective still following leads on his wife and child's murders from three years ago. While at an informant's house party, he runs into Natasha Sax (upcoming Quantum of Solace Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), who later winds up hacked to pieces in an alley behind Max's apartment. When Max realizes that his wife's and Natasha's murders are somehow related, he teams up with Natasha's sister Mona (Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Mila Kunis) to find the murderer.

Visually and aurally, the film succeeds where the plot flatlines. In keeping with the game's film noir feeling, the cinematography is moody and dark (think The Dark Knight, only less blue). The monochromatic palette allows for some cool lighting effects, like in one scene in a parking garage where the only source of light comes from Max's dual MP5 machine guns. It is not quite as gritty or visually striking as Frank Miller's Sin City, but it works well.

But if there is one reason to see this film in theaters, it is definitely for the sound. Max Payne has some of the best sound effects since Saving Private Ryan. The guns are loud and pack a punch, the crashes and explosions are deep and even the little things like footsteps crunching through the snow or the sounds of the characters' leather jackets add a nice touch. This is definitely a film for which watching with laptop speakers won't cut it.

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Director John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, The Omen) and writer Beau Thorne have managed to stay true to the plot of the game for the most part. They have, however, dropped the original's mafia elements and certain characters like Senator Alfred Woden, who saves Max from prosecution in the game.

Not that the audience will notice. One of Max Payne's weaknesses lies in its spotty character development. Most of the characters in the film seem flat and one-dimensional. Screen time - perhaps too much - is devoted to explaining who they are and where they come from, but none of them feel as dynamic as Max, and when the film inevitably kills some of them off, nobody in the audience will shed a tear.

And where is the bullet time? The trailer implied that Max Payne would stay true to the John Woo- and Matrix-inspired roots of the videogame, where Max leaps and blasts his way through hundreds of bad guys in ultra-cool slow-mo. The film contains maybe two scenes toward the end in which this happens. Granted, they both look damn cool, but it's a case of too little, too late. Bullet time, which in the game enabled Max to dodge bullets while the world and enemies around him slowed to a crawl, was a key gameplay mechanic in the original Max Payne, and it's a shame to see the film doesn't use it more.

The bottom line is that Max Payne takes what was originally an M-rated video game and shoehorns it into a PG-13 movie. While the level of violence was most likely toned down in the interests of appealing to a wider audience, the movie feels weak as a result.

John Moore was probably trying to avoid a brainless action-fest like Michael Davis' Shoot 'Em Up, but he ended up making a film that includes more gunfire in the closing credits than in the actual movie.

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