Max Payne

I can almost picture director John Moore (2006's remake of The Omen) grinning ear-to-ear as the MPAA handed back his Max Payne with a teen-friendly PG-13. Here is a movie that contains multiple shootings, more deaths than most R-rated slashers hold, and frequent instances of drug use, both by the villains and by the hero during the film's climax. And yet, because the "f-bomb" is only dropped once in the dialogue and what little nudity there is in the movie has been carefully edited, Hollywood has deemed this movie okay for teens to see. Good to know someone out there is looking out for our kids.

Max Payne is based on a series of video games. I have not played any of them, and the movie doesn't really spark any desire to. However, I do know that the games were intended for mature audiences. Despite the rating, so is the movie. The title character is an angry police detective played by Mark Wahlberg. Yes, his character is really named Max Payne. With a name like that, of course he's going to be a grizzled and angry cop. That, or a professional wrestler. In a year where we already saw Wahlberg slip up with The Happening, I don't think a video game movie was the wisest of choices to act as a follow up. Back to the plot: Max is a dark and brooding figure who now works at the cold case films department. He hasn't been the same ever since he came home from work one day, saw some men had broken into his house, and found his wife and baby murdered. To show his grief, he dresses almost entirely in leather, and sulks around the dark streets of New York (actually Toronto, standing in for New York), where it is constantly raining, snowing, or overcast. It's as if the weather somehow shares his pain.

Max is searching for the slime who was behind the murder of his family, and almost everything leads to a dead end. That's when his former partner Alex (Donal Logue) notices a tattoo that was on the arm of Max's wife in a crime scene photo that seems to be connected to other recent victims, who have the same tattoo as her. Before he can figure out the connection, he's murdered in Max's apartment, making Max the prime suspect. As if that wasn't enough, a girl who visited his apartment the night before named Natasha (Olga Kurylenko) turns up dismembered in an alley nearby. Natasha's sister, a gun-toting femme fatale named Mona Sax (a miscast Mila Kunis), initially thinks Max is her killer, but he soon convinces her that Natasha's murderer also killed his wife, and they're looking for the same man. So now Max has company as he sulks around the city, looking tortured. Oh, and there are supposedly demons flying about the city, snatching up paranoid junkies and drug addicts. Or maybe not...

You see, part of the film's plot has to do with a drug that supposedly gives whoever takes it enhanced abilities. Unfortunately, it also causes the user to hallucinate that demons from hell are after them. The hallucinations seem to have been written into the script so that the movie could at least claim to have some interesting visuals, since the dialogue and plotting are third rate. They look impressive, and certainly do provide some striking and interesting images. Unfortunately, they're just computer generated effects, and have very little to do with anything going on in the movie itself. The first time I saw the creatures, I was intrigued. The second time, a little less so. By the time they made their final appearance, I had long realized they were just there for show, and was tired of them. When it's not fooling us with intriguing supernatural undertones that don't go anywhere, the movie is a tepid crime noir drama that's just too generic to inspire any sort of response. We've seen it before, we've seen it done better, and we'll most likely see it again when the sequel comes around. (Sit through the end credits for a final scene afterward that hints at a franchise.) The characters race from Point A to B through a convoluted plot we care little about, never really saying anything of interest or showing any real personality.

The actors at least seem to be making the best of a bad situation, even if they often look like they wish they were somewhere else. Mark Wahlberg growls his way through every line of dialogue, and looks pissed off when he's killing hundreds of faceless gunmen, so I guess he gets the job done in the lead. As the female lead, Mila Kunis doesn't look comfortable at all as her character, and it just makes you want to re-watch her likable and funny performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where she seemed a whole lot happier. The rest of the cast includes such actors as Beau Bridges (as a close friend of Max), Chris O'Donnell (who shows up as a nervous guy who might know more about the murder of Max's wife than he lets on), and even rapper-turned actor Ludacris turns up as a cop investigating Max's connection to all these bodies that seem to follow wherever he goes. Like Wahlberg, they get the job done, but don't exactly seem very interested in the story they're trying to tell. Probably because the story gives them so little to do, they'd be better off staying in bed.

Max Payne is surprisingly leisurely in its pacing until the climax, which plays like a massive shootout crossed with an explosion at the special effects factory. And I haven't even gotten to the part where the hero decides to use the deadly hallucinating drug in order to give him strength to kill all the bad guys. Yes, that's right, the hero only wins in this movie because he takes the drug the bad guys have been pushing to junkies on the street. Talk about your mixed signals. I'd ask the filmmakers what they were thinking when they threw that in the script, but something tells me thinking was the last thing on anyone's mind when it came to this movie's script.

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