Max Payne had a fairly complex plot for a video game. Detective Max Payne comes home one day and finds junkies in his home, and kills a couple of them before discovering that they’ve murdered his wife and infant child. He decides to transfer to the DEA as a result, and later discovers that there is a link between the pharmaceutical company his wife used to work for, the junkies, the mafia, and dirty DEA agents. The game was also infamous for featuring scenes inside Max’s head: there’s the constant sound of a baby crying, and you have to walk along a blood trail on the ground suspended over a dark void. If you fall off, Max fully loses it, goes nuts, and dies. To this day the “baby levels” are still used as examples of nightmare-inducing bad game design.
The Mark Wahlberg-starring movie, which opens today, tries to simplify the plot, and ends up differing from the game quite a bit. However, those changes are for the worse. What was a dark and gritty video game full of gunplay becomes a stylistic mess where the director tries to imitate other movies.
Max is now an angry cop in the Cold Case files division, looking for clues about his wife’s murder. He gets a lead on a thug who may have been connected, and through him he meets a sultry woman named Natasha at a party where people are guzzling a blue-colored drug from vials. There he meets her tough-as-nails sister Mona, played by an extremely vampy Mila Kunis. Natasha tries to seduce Max, but he refuses her and she later winds up dead in an alley, hacked to pieces. Max is brought in to identify her body since she’s found with his wallet, and he notices the distinctive wing tattoo she has on her wrist.
Max finds out his old partner Alex (Donal Logue, in yet another role where he ends up dead after two minutes of screen time) may have found a connection between Natasha and his wife’s murder. Which is where your ability to suspend disbelief will snap. What he’s found is that one of the junkies Max killed when he found his wife has a tattoo almost identical to Natasha’s. Somehow Max never noticed this, nor the fact that every bad guy in the the movie has these tattoos? Max goes looking for Alex’s killer, and finds Mona, who believes he’s responsible for Natasha’s death. They find out about a new drug on the streets called Valkyr, which Natasha was using.
Max talks with B.B., head of security at the Aesir, the pharmaceutical company where his wife worked, and crosses paths with Lt. Jim Bravura (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) in internal affairs. Eventually Max finds out that his wife had discovered that the Valkyr program was meant to breed super soldiers at Aesir, and had the side effect of being extremely addictive and driving people crazy. She was going to go public with the knowledge, but B.B. had her killed. This sets up the endgame at the massive and gothic Aesir corporate offices downtown. There are many efforts to tie the drug usage to Norse mythology with the wing tattoos, the flying creatures, and a club called Ragnarok, but they feel as flat as the CGI that creates them.
Having played both Max Payne games, watching the film reminds me that Max Payne was a pretty decent video game. It set the bar for a massive gun battle between an angry cop and anyone who stood in his way, and had plot that ran deep. But the film is terrible. It’s a combination of the ludicrous story (how would Payne miss those enormous clues?) and the fact that director Ryan Moore is trying to copy the style of Sin City. There are dozens of shots of a black cityscape with stark white swirling snow on top of it that look like they were yanked straight out of the Rodriguez / Miller film. Also, the game was all about the gunplay — at one count Max Payne has killed 625 people by the end of the game. Lauded as having been obviously influenced by John Woo films, it put an emphasis on bullet time, where Max can slow things down and pull off spectacular moves. In the movie, there are only two shootout scenes: one in Aesir, and the other at the Ragnarok club. Why would you deny your target audience the gun-fu they’re going to expect?
It’s also pretty hard to ignore some of implausible moments in the movie, like Mila Kunis trying to act like a vampy thug. She just can’t pull it off. There’s a also a scene where Mark Wahlberg hauls himself out an icy river and is forced to take Valkyr to keep himself alive. He screams out to the sky in a scene that’s meant to show anguish, but it comes off as comical. Additionally, even though Ryan Moore claims in the press notes that the character of B.B. (ironically played by Beau Bridges) that he’s “One of the greatest ‘twist’ characters that we’ve seen in a long time…” Either Ryan Moore doesn’t see many movies, or someone wrote this for him. Billy Crudup’s character in Mission Impossible III is a good example of a twist character, but Beau Bridges’ B.B. is the kind you can see coming from ten miles away.
While watching the scant few action sequences, I was reminded about all of the cool gun-fu in Shoot ‘Em Up, a film that had a tissue-thin plot at best. It nailed the action, but failed on story. Max Payne fails on both counts, and it’s unclear why they didn’t stay more faithful to the video game plot, which is a lot more intricate than the movie. Or at the very least, just feature more gunplay. There’s a painfully long scene after the credits in Max Payne where you find out that Max’s job isn’t done. Mona slides him the newspaper, which shows that Aesir is now enjoying record profits, and features a photo of CEO Nicole Horne. I guess we now know the plot of Max Payne 2. Let’s hope it never happens.
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