Max Payne - Movie Review

Max Payne is a maverick cop — a mythic anti-hero — determined to track down those responsible for the brutal murders of his family and partner

• Director: John Moore
• Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges, Olga Kurylenko

• RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes

• RATING: *1/2


Wahlberg never cracks a smile as Max Payne, a hard-boiled cop right out of pulp novels, a pariah in self-imposed exile in the police basement who spends his free time looking for his wife’s killer.The rest of the department assumes he’s guilty of... what, exactly, is not really clear. Like a lot of things in the movie.

Max’s search takes him to a street tribe with Valkyrie wing tattoos and a crazed warrior priest who seems to command shadow armies of winged creatures.They could be the personal demons of drug addicts transformed into the literal in a crazed reworking of Norse mythology. It’s disappointing that Moore fails to, even on the most elementary level, tap into that metaphorical power once the more secular explanation kicks in.

Max Payneis a dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualises better than he dramatises. Moore creates a vivid fantasy noir world that moves so stylishly it can carry you through all the absurdities by sheer imagery and momentum.As long as you don’t think too much about it.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Max Paynehas three words on its mind: blam, blam and blam. Mark Wahlberg stars in the title role as a New York City detective trying to solve the murder of his wife in an eardrum-stomping shoot-’em-all flick that started as a video game and didn’t make it a whole lot farther down the road than that.

It’s got a look, though: If you bring earplugs, you might be able to appreciate it as a beady-eyed and sharp-toothed little noir that explodes against a backdrop of washedout colour, bleak blacks and decaying grays.

Payne is chasing the secret behind a sinister pharmaceutical company’s new product, a drug that turns you into either a superman or a lunatic, but probably both.The freaky images of what happens after you pop the drug are among the most visually overpowering in a movie that is alive with hallucinatory scenes. Looks only give you half a movie, though, and the other half is purely perfunctory. Racing through lonely alleys and looming on stark rooftops, Max Payneclatters from one action set piece to the next.
New York Post

Based on the popular first-person shooter from Rockstar Games, Max Payne has been adapted for the screen by UT-Austin alum Beau Thorne. Payne is a NYPD coldcase cop who was assigned to the policedepartment equivalent of the dead-letter office after his wife and child were killed by cityscape scum and he went edgewise.

With Payne, it’s personal. Understandably obsessed with tracking down his family’s killers, he stalks through a generically gothic Gotham, searching for the Valkyrie tattoo that marks his quarry. He’s joined in his solitary quest by a leggy Eastern European assassin (That ‘70s Show’s Kunis), whose sister may have been snuffed by the same wild, drug-addled villains.And then there’s Bridges, who is cast unexpectedly - and, it must be said, badly - as Payne’s former ally in the war on crime, now gone dark and possibly untrustworthy.
Austin Chronicle

Max Payne is a policeman determined to find out who murdered his wife and baby. It’s been three years since the unsolved murders, and he was taken off the detective beat and assigned to cold cases. Emotionally numb, he is a leatherclad avenging angel, desperately chasing every lead to get the truth. He’s being framed for murder. There’s a connection between a creepy-looking tattoo and mysterious deaths. Max and his former partner Alex (Donal Logue) are on the outs. No one in the police force understands him.The only people who know the truth and can help him are dead. Throw in the involvement of military officials gone bad and a corrupt pharmaceutical giant, and just about all the predictable bases are covered.At a key point, Nelly Furtado, who plays Alex’s wife, slaps Max after firing off a cutting remark: “What has Max Payne ever done except bring misery?”
USA Today