Most films adapted from video games have a pesky habit of achieving the entertainment value of watching someone else play that game for about two hours. Fortunately, Max Payne eschews the monotonous first-person shooter mentality that has driven most video game movies, and focuses on actually developing a story. Unfortunately, it finds plenty of other ways to be boring. For a film that’s as big and loud as this one, it sure has a hard time keeping your attention.
The clean-cut Mark Wahlberg is woefully miscast as the titular antihero — Max Payne is a gritty, mean, and pissed off dude. The most Wahlberg manages to do to communicate that is not smile. He’s supposed to be hell-bent on revenge after the unsolved murders of his wife and child, but it’s never that convincing.
Max is joined in his quest for the truth by the mysterious Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) after the unsolved murder of her sister. Mona roams the streets with her badass posse, but it’s never clear what her significance is in the grand scheme of things. “You know what I am,” she tells Max, but the audience sure doesn’t. All we know is that she wears a lot of eyeliner.
Director John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines) either fails or refuses to imbue his characters and their situations with any substance. No one expects a film like Max Payne to focus on character development, but as more and more random people come into the story and either die or kill someone else, it starts to matter less and less. The supporting cast is mostly interchangeable (although I enjoyed a few unintentional laughs at the appearance of washed-up actors Chris O’Donnell and Beau Bridges) and most of the middle of the film is expendable. You could cut out a random scene here or there, and no one would notice. It’s all bluster and filler.
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