Monday, January 31, 2011

Max Payne (2008)

In 2001, Remedy made its mark on the gaming world with Max Payne, a gritty, noir-style third person shooter and detective story. Its gimmick was the seemingly groundbreaking "bullet time," cribbed heavily from The Matrix and John Woo films. Though a fun distraction, its central gameplay feature also prevented it from attaining any sort of broader appeal (can't really manipulate time in a multiplayer match). With a grand total of 5.5 hours of playtime between the two games, Max Payne gained some popularity among noir neophytes and amateur vigilantes whose fanboy aspirations quickly moved on to the Halo and Chris Nolan Batman franchises.

Cut to 2008 as director John Moore releases the game's film adaptation. Rather than appease fanboys with a direct retelling of an already overwhelmingly cinematic video game, Moore takes its mishmash of influences and adds a few dozen more for good measure. What results is a capably executed but dully trite visual cacophony of cinematographic excess that left fans of the franchise fuming. Why were they so upset, you ask? Because some things were slightly different.

Forget it, Max. It's Vikingtown.
Max Payne is a hard and gritty New York cop whose family was murdered three years prior in a home invasion gone terribly wrong. Max is understandably upset by this traumatizing affair and shows it by clomping around the city with a permanent scowl, occasionally stopping to draw his gun or verbally abuse someone.

Even without this tragic past, Max would probably retain the same grouchy demeanor, as the film's dark, Gotham-esque vision of New York would render anyone living there with a permanent and debilitating case of Seasonal Affective Disorder. When it isn't snowing, it's raining. When it isn't raining or snowing, it's raining AND snowing. Such weather is only appropriate for grim missions of vengeance, or pondering weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

It even rains inside.
Where are the hundreds of giant black men in vests and woolen hats carrying large radios? Max Payne cribs from Sin City so extensively, they could at least make it 100% clear how grim and gritty and realistic it is. Wait, Noo Yawk is beset with roving gangs of junkies and mysterious grisly murders? I guess that will have to do.

Either he's addicted to smack or he has the flu.
When Max's drug-addled slutty contact Natasha (Olga Kurylenko) is found murdered, his former partner discovers a connection to his wife's killing.  Has there ever been a friendly wholesome character named Natasha? Are all Natashas doomed to lives as sultry, curvaceous succubi?

"Would you like making sex tonight?"
Upon discovering the clue, Max uses his years of experience on the force to implement a series of intricate and time-tested detective techniques: yelling at suspects, drawing his gun on suspects, threatening to shoot suspects, and yelling at suspects while shooting at or threatening to shoot them. Since this is a dark and gritty vigilante film, these tactics get him everywhere.

By the 23rd minute Max Payne shows all its cards. A mysterious drug on the street? A large pharmaceutical company? An old friend who works at the company who seems to have Max's best interests at heart? Max gets another tip when he visits a friendly tattoo artist who knows an inordinate amount about ancient Norse mythology. So much so that he keeps an old leather bound book on his counter dealing with this very subject.

For more information visit your local library.
Max follows the trail to his wife's former employer Aesir Pharmaceuticals, which created a drug called Valkyr, specifically designed to increase soldier aggressiveness. How could such a project ever go awry?

Aesir Pharmaceuticals: We're not evil (please ignore the giant eyeball).
Max finally puts his inner torment to rest with years of structured counseling. Actually he chugs two vials of Valkyr and goes on a shooting rampage at the Aesir building. Either one works just fine.

While director John Moore takes careful thought in the design of each individual shot, everything doesn't quite add up. At the beginning, a detective states that Max's wife and child were murdered, but when the murderer confesses to the deed, he only mentions the wife. He would have no need to kill the child. And at the tail end of one of the flashbacks, Max discovers his wife's body as his child cries. Did Max drop the kid off at someone's doorstep and just tell everyone it was killed? Where is this baby?

Furthermore, the uses and implementations of the drug are a little unclear. Are the effects physical, mental, or both? Are the Valkyries hallucinations of the user or manifestations of some deeper sorcery? I doubt someone with no prior knowledge of Viking history could just hallucinate its mythical creatures.

This isn't happening! I got a D in World History!
Though the film retains similar concepts and ideas as the original games, many fans complained because it didn't feel like a Max Payne movie. Most video game fans are livid any time a filmmaker uses the word "adaptation" for its intended purpose. Why is this one thing different? Where is the grating omnipresent voice-over and endless gameplay-padding dream sequences? Why didn't you just string together two hours of screenshots? I'm sure Frank L. Baum wrote a lengthy screed attacking the makers of The Wizard of Oz film for changing Dorothy's slippers from silver to ruby.

Fanboys are terrified of any sort of change. And even though Max Payne isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, at least Moore tried something a little different from the source material, even if it is a cliche-ridden episode of Law & Order with supernatural influences. Despite this, the film is visually stunning, the special effects are expertly utilized, and the acting is surprisingly competent.

Critics continued their predictable and irrational hatred of video game movies by universally panning Max Payne. What's amazing is how critics respond to a bland, predictable film with bland, predictable criticism. "There's plenty of Payne to be found here - in more ways than one." I see what you did there, James. Truly you are a modern day Wordsworth.

I'm not sure where their vitriol toward video game adaptations comes from; it's like they see video games as a threat to their chosen profession and will do everything in their power to prevent their encroachment into film. They also seem set on completely dismissing video games as a source material.

It's not that a good video game adaptation can never exist, but that its audience has yet to insist upon it. There is no flaw in the medium itself, just in the way it's been implemented up to this point. Filmmakers need to decide whether they're adapting video games, or merely buying the rights to sell tickets. Until they can commit to the former (or stop half-assing the latter), video games and video game adaptations will continue to be dismissed by critics who know little about either.

Arbitrary rating:

108 rotten reviews out of 129


  1. Hahaha great post. I was really saddened by this movie as I am a huge fan of Max Payne, but it was just too awful to like. I lost my shit when you talked about the knowledgeable tattoo artist.

  2. The tattoo artist was probably just related to the security guard from Alone in the Dark.

    I, too, am a fan of the video games. Your points are well made, Nick, about adaptations, especially your last paragraph. I was upset/disappointed not necessarily because the story or the way it was told was changed, but because it was changed into something worse than what I already knew. I think the default reaction then of fans is to ask why the changes were made.

    Your point about filmmakers buying the rights to a video game property in order to sell tickets describes a practice that frustrates me. There are a number of items in Max Payne in particular that seem to be changed not for a storytelling or artistic reason, but simply to make more money. A PG-13 movie based on an M-rated game? Mila Kunis and Ludacris? I am aggravate.