Confirming Suspicions: A Review of 'Max Payne'

The Unbearable Boredom of Characterisation: Wahlberg plays the titular cop like he's sitting down playing the original videogame, only with less emoting.

It snows a lot in New York. Unless it’s raining (and then it’s raining a lot). Or if it’s in a caramel-tinted flashback where the dipping sun seems to be positioned just outside every window of happy, family-oriented detective (!) Max Payne’s house. But this glowing, treacle-like existence was a long-time ago, and now Mr Payne is a tortured soul, the city around him evoking his emotional and spiritual frostbite with oodles of pathetic fallacy. Emphasis on the pathetic.

Yes, we’re firmly in hollowed-out-dour-renegade-cop territory with Max Payne, based on the apparently very successful videogame of the same name. As with other such adaptations, the film succumbs to a workmanlike hyper-kineticism and a forgettable blue-black-chrome colour palette which, originally an invocation of ‘serious’ drama, has now been appropriated into the realm of cheap teenage thrills (recent exhibits being Shoot Em Up and Death Race). In fact, much the same slippage could be applied to star Mark Wahlberg, a man not serviced well by playing characters without a sense of humour and constrained to keep their lingo suitable for a 12-certificated crowd.

Investigating his family’s massacre, as well as the subsequent disembowelment of several other unremarkable characters, Wahlberg’s Max Payne uncovers a dangerous pharmaceutical designed for application within the military which turns you into either an invincible super-soldier or leads to the taker suffering visions of apocalyptic fire and brimstone (memories of Constantine’s similarly digital hell-on-Earth). These hallucinations, all swooping devils and searing sparks, occasionally pull a viewer from their stupor, but in making both the screeching judgement day and everyday New York equally stylised and embellished the film surrenders its most original conceit to the deadening onslaught of plot-predictability and slow-motion shotgun blasts (the latter of which continue over the closing credits, magnified to fill the entire screen, the much smaller actor’s names indicating something of a hierarchy of priorities). One need only look to the upcoming Franklyn to see how the wildly strange can mix with a brittle everyday existence far more effectively.

Featuring some unfortunate acting from those from some perversely cast actors (true, we might not expect better from Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to discover anyone desperate for the return of Chris O’Donnell to our screens, while at least Beau Bridges has the excuse of following in his brother’s recent Iron Man footprints), Max Payne seems like a labour of apathy for all those involved, a tired and unnecessary film walking glumly down a well-worn path.