Max Payne review

Max Payne

Ok well we are out of Uwe Boll movies so whose turn is it now to make a video game movie. That’s right you guessed it Marky Mark. Ok maybe he’s only the actor playing our hero but if I had said John Moore (the director) you would have said huh? Anyway pretty big budget, big name actors we will see what happens.
Max Payne is about a cop whose family is murdered Max then moves to cold case department where no information about his family’s death leads him to take on a huge corporation.

So it seems as far as the fans are concerned this movie is split down the middle they either love or hate it I liked it a lot and thought it wasn’t bad. What’s funny is the president of 3d realms who are the production studio behind the game said he hated the movie then when it started making money said he loved it can’t deny the power of money.

So any way let’s run down the list of things that made Max Payne a great game.

1. Intresting dark plot with an old school noir feel to it.

2. Dynamic game play that maid bullet time a staple of game play in many games to come.

3. Well acted and developed characters.

Now how many of these transferred over to the movie? The plot is almost the same they changed a few characters back stories around including max’s but it’s still dark and still just as messed up as the game and the few changes don’t really do anything to hurt the plot in my opinion.

The movies certainly doesn’t revolutionize anything as far as camera work goes but they did use a super fast, 10,000 frames per second camera to film the one bullet time sequence in the movie and that worked really well. And that’s one thing I do like is the fact that while bullet time is prominent in the game using it that much in the movie would not be a good idea so they had one scene as a tribute to the game and it worked very well.

The actors may not have been the best but I don’t have any gripes ever since the big hit I’ve liked Mark Whalberg as an actor and I think he did a good job Mila Kunis felt a bit out of place as an assassin as I’m used to her being in comedy roles but was convincing enough or me.

Now how much does the plot follow the game? Well it hits on the important parts. Max’s family getting killed, his old partner dyeing and him being framed for it, his wife’s company being responsible for the drug and his family’s death and of course the most important part max’s leather jacket.

I do feel as if the noir part of the movie was kind of like an afterthought. In the game max narrates to himself the whole time in the movie he talks to himself at the beginning and that’s about it I think it would have been a bit better with more of max narrating to himself.

With the exception of the two mob families all the major characters where there max, Jack Lupino, B.B., Alex Balder, Mona Sax, Jim Bravura and of course plenty of random thugs who get shot up.

The action scenes are also done well and capture the franticness of when max is surrounded in the game. And the ending sequence feels like a video game with a new set of bad guys popping out around every corner.

A lot of people complained about the valkyrie's saying Max Payne never had demons or monsters but the valkyrie’s are clearly hallucinations from taking valkyr and are symbolic of Max's struggles against his own inner demons much like the nightmare stages from the game especially at the end when max basically tells the valkyrie’s to piss off he’s not done yet.

Overall Max Payne is definitely one of the better video game movies out there fans with an open mind and non fans of the game can enjoy the movie and unless you’re one of the people that hate mark Whalberg then you should be able to enjoy it too.

How would I do it? I would have focused a bit more on making It a noir movie with more narration from max like in the game and maybe just maybe one extra bullet time scene but I’m a sucker for bullet time.

Overall I give Max Payne 8 out of 10 bottles of painkillers. The action was done well they avoided overusing bullet time and they were able to touch the major points of the plot.

The acting gets 7 out of 10. As I said before unless you hate mark Whalberg or Marky Mark as some call him there should be no real gripe here beau bridges was great as the bad guy and ill even admit Ludicrous wasn’t bad and I hate when singers try to act I mean have you seen the sequel to john carpenter’s vampires Bon Jovi killing vampires ech.

The content gets 8 out of 10. We had plenty of gunplay. We got max’s signature dive and we got one hell of a cool bullet time sequence as well as a good chunk of game characters.

The plot gets 7 out of 10. It touched on the main points like max’s families death his partner being killed and his and Mona's relationship the only things it was missing was him being undercover in the mob and him getting guns from the Russians.

So that’s it sorry it’s not as long as normal but oh well. Next time we dig into street fighter the legend of Chun-Li. Will this revamp of the franchise be any good? Will we get hilarious quotes we can use like “for me it was Tuesday.” Or “of course!!!” who knows by find out next time as I wrap up what I will refer to as Vol. 1 of video game movie reviews.