Column:

'Max Payne' better on the PC

Mark Wahlberg brings video game character to big screen.

By Joey Vergara

Published Oct. 30, 2008

I remember playing "Max Payne" in seventh grade and thinking I had found my new favorite video game. It took the over-stylized special effects of "The Matrix" and placed them in New York streets. It was both creepy and familiar at once.

But more than anything, I was confused by its storyline. As far as I can tell, the titular character's wife and baby are murdered, and he begins an endless quest for vengeance. Said quest leads him into contact with the mafia, "the Russians" (in the cliché, generalized sense) and a massive corporate conspiracy. It sounds simple enough, but when you get to the dream sequences and drug-induced trips, things get weird.

Lose the mafia and add more focus on hallucinations caused by the drugs produced by the corporation Aesir and you have the film adaptation of "Max Payne." When the game makes little sense, "Max Payne" the movie is even harder to wrap your head around.

Ten years ago no one would have imagined a cast as unexpected as this. Marky Mark playing a tough-guy, vengeance craving cop, Ludracis as an internal affairs agent and Mila Kunis as a Russian gun-for-hire? The Funky Bunch, Kelso and Fez might as well play the drugged-up villains.

By comparison, "Max Payne" isn't that bad of a video game adaptation if you ignore the plot complications. Director John Moore recreates the NYC of the game on the screen shot-for-shot, leaving Max's city in a constant downpour or blizzard. The picture is grayed and dimmed, à la "Sin City," in a very literal approach to representing Max's troubles.

With few exceptions, video games stray from character development, and in adapting "Max Payne" from the PC, screenwriter Beau Thorne has lost some of the game's developed characterization. Wahlberg's Max is everything you would expect - one-dimensional, chased by plenty of inner demons and immovable in his mission. All in all, it's by-the-numbers business.

Luda's Agent Bravura and Kunis' Mona have little purpose beyond an excuse to tell Max's back story and kill a few conveniently placed bad guys, respectively.

The best part of "Max Payne" the game, as I remember it, was the revolutionary bullet-time feature. It wasn't a novel idea by any means, but no game had perfected slowing down gunfights so you could see bullets flying toward you and increase your own fighting abilities so well.

The movie version takes this memory and turns it into a laughable parody. The feel of the film is changed abruptly when these goofy slow motion sequences begin. Wahlberg bends over backwards to shoot his shotgun at a corporate goon, and the masked villains fall from buildings and are rocketed yards away by single bullets. "The Matrix" did it best, and "Max Payne" comes off more copycat than innovative as a result. With these scenes, I still feel how I did in junior high - "Max Payne" would make a great movie. It's very cinematic, and its familiar archetypes are altered just enough to make it worthwhile.