Movie Review: “Max Payne”
Mark Wahlberg says hi to your mother with Mila Kunis in “Max Payne.”
Rating: 51
Measured against the low bar set by video game adaptations, “Max Payne” serves as a minor victory, boasting a discernable story, solid supporting performances and an aesthetic that owes just as much to film noir as it does to cut-rate “Matrix” effects. Yes, someone cared enough to make an actual movie based on a “third-person shooter” instead of just a series of slow-motion spinning bullet shots.
Detective Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) snapped and got shuffled down to the cold case repository after his wife and newborn son were killed in a home invasion. Max spends his off-duty hours scouring for clues and shaking down junkies addicted to virulent new street drug in a New York City where the ’90s renaissance never happened, a real hellhole.
The murder of party girl Natasha Sax (Olga Kurylenko) puts Max under immediate police scrutiny — his wallet was found on the body — and he finds an unlikely partner in her sister Mona (Mila Kunis), a mobbed-up hitwoman. Max soon finds himself wrapped in a conspiracy involving his wife’s former employer, a pharmaceutical company, and a shadowy figure named Lupino (Amaury Nolasco) with wing tattoos on his face.
Such plot points suggest that “Max Payne” is so hard-boiled it could shatter, and that’s not far off the mark: director John Moore (2006’s “Omen” remake) incorporates visual elements of German Expressionism and the film noir it birthed. And there are just enough good plot points and solid supporting performances from Kunis, Beau Bridges and Donal Logue to make “Max Payne” resemble a decent graphic novel adaptation instead of a video game cash-in.
But Wahlberg is a bit too hard-boiled, even for a two-dimensional hero. He has just enough lines to not qualify as mute, and he seems to have taken one joking criticism of the video game version of Max to heart: he almost always looks vaguely constipated. But the film moves along with surprising detail for such an enterprise and only sporadically devolves into a bullet storm, making “Max Payne” surprisingly painless.
— George Lang
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Doesn’t Mark Wahlberg always look vaguely constipated? I always thought that was his niche, like Keanu’s blank stare and double take one-two punch.