Oh sweet Christ.
There are bad movies that are decent (Con Air) and there are bad movies that are not decent (Paul Blart: Mall Cop). Max Payne is a horrible movie that is fucking atrocious.
When I used to play Max Payne, I never dreamt about it. And if I had dreamt about it, my dreams would not have been wild. But even in my wildest dreams, I would have never thought anyone would be retarded enough to make it into a feature-length movie. Why? Because the entire game consists of running around at night in New York and shooting everyone you see.
Unfortunately, John Moore did not receive my imaginary memo. That, and the fact that he's a fucking douche that subjected the world to The Omen. (I'm sure you recall the 6-6-06 frenzy; generally speaking, one wants to make a film and then pick a release date, not vice versa.) And so he crafted this amazingly awful work of crap, Max Payne. So let's tackle the movie as haphazardly as possible, so as to accurately convey the mood of the production. A lazy man's stream-of-consciousness, if you will.
In MP-ville, it snows every minute of every day, but never accumulates to more than an inch. The drab colors and incredibly stylized action scenes look like the work of Frank Miller's autistic stepdaughter. Somehow, Chris O'Donnell -- contrary to myriad reports -- is not dead. He's actually alive, and acting... in Max Payne. He is horrible, and -- MAJOR HOLY MCFUCK SPOILER ALERT -- he dies. Mark Wahlberg (Sir Payne) can apparently hold his breath in subzero water for multiple minutes and escape unscathed. An old guy who appears by Max's hospital bed as a friend early in the film actually turns out to have killed Max's wife and child. Pretty original, if you ask me.
Apparently, someone in casting decided that Mila Kunis (yes, this Mila Kunis) would be a natural as an Uzi-toting underworld goddess or something. That person decided wrong. I will die happy if I never have to see Mila Kunis trying to act serious again. And yet, in the grand scheme of things, this was such a minor transgression; you see, Ludacris plays an Internal Affairs detective. Based on the result, I'd say the odds that Ludacris chose to refine his chops at Julliard in between his work in Crash and this delightful performance are fairly long. To say he is token would do a disservice to men like these. His job in Max Payne is to be suspicious of Max and do a lot of snorting and huffing and screaming to get this crucially important point across as best as he possibly can. I don't think he will win Best Supporting Actor.
Perhaps most maddening about this abomination is the lack of a payoff. I don't think I could justify watching or recommending this movie even if there was a slam-bang shoot-'em-up finale (in that case, why not just youtube the final scene -- it's not like I need proper context to fully appreciate Mark Wahlberg unloading his Remington into a building of people). And yet as it is, the end of the movie totally sucks. Max just takes his super steroids and goes running through the mega-evil pharmaceutical building, pumping bullets into every moving object. Everything is dark and the bullet-time is TERRIBLE (yo dude... the Wachowski "brothers" did this a decade ago and it demolishes these FX). Like, you would think that somewhere amidst the development of this atrocity, the key players held a meeting. What made Max Payne a popular video game? Bullet time and getting the opportunity to shoot random strangers (this was pre-GTA III). What will make Max Payne a popular big screen item? This is the part of the dialogue where a heretofore quiet young Indian production intern pipes up and brings it to the attention of the rest of the downies at 20th Century Fox that they've been preempted. Twice. Actually, thrice. And it is at this point that, ideally, any director or producer who didn't have a sadistic and fucktarded sense of humor puts the kibosh on the whole deal.
Alas, this didn't happen.
