Truth be told, I own so many movies that I don’t know where to start. Should I do a movie, a game, or a TV show first? Where do I begin? Do I write about a good movie, or a bad one? Drama, or action? Maybe a comedy. Or maybe I can toss my pen over my shoulder and write about the video it lands closest to. Yeah, I can do that…
Shit…
I can’t do that one. I can’t. It’s too much. Not for the first round. Oh, shit. This one’s bad.
My fellow new readers, I’m about to take a bullet from a movie that pissed me off to the point that, in the theater, I went MST3K on them. Well, no point putting it off any longer, sonsabitches and sisters of fucks. I give you the 2008 line of blow, Max Payne. Ah, fuck me.
When this movie was announced, I was excited. Me, a big fan of the game. I thought “If you give Mark Walberg a gun, and some bullets, you would have an awesome porno…of guns.” I thought that there would be so much testosterone flowing that a clean-shaven man could sit down to watch it, and walk away with a full beard. What I got was a kool-aid-drinking, emo douchebag.
I'll do it, I swear.
SPOILER ALERT!
For those of you who have not seen this movie, read on and save yourself the Payne. My first complaint with the movie is the rating: PG-13. That was my first warning. The game was a dark, violent, gothic story that when brought to the big screen, the only way to do it justice, would be an R rating. But noooo, we got a watered-down PG-13. So for this article, I’m going to watch the unrated version to see if they fixed some of my complaints (hint: they didn’t).
Two Yoo-Hoos down, and the DVD isn’t even started yet. I need more liquid courage.
Yeah, that's a Yoohootini.
To be fair, the opening of the movie starts with this really awesome monologue. But it’s the only voiceover in the movie, which sucks, because there is a lot of long tracking shots or scenes where nothing happens. A well-written narration would have helped set the mood, and also would have made the movie closer to the game, which was loaded with Max’s dark and depressing thoughts and was almost a satire of the noir films of the 30’s and 40’s. Where the game was a sort of action-mystery, with Max blowing through waves of bad guys, the movie is god-awfully slow, with characters with no point other than to fill a few minutes of screen time. Let’s look at our two leads for a comparison:
First, Mark Walberg. He gives an awesome performance, but the shittiness of the writing and directing proved too much for him to handle. For as “good” as he did with the role, I think there should have been a slightly-older actor cast as Max. Walberg seemed too young to be a hardened, seasoned detective. He just doesn’t seem that experienced. I don’t think Mark Walberg truly understood the character. It may have just been the bad direction he was given, but in the game, Max was a depressed, suicidal cop. And he was pissed. If you saw this man walking down the fucking road, you would fear for your life. In the movie, Max just mopes around. If you saw him, you’d think he was just having a bad day. After seeing your wife and newborn son killed, you should kinda be a little more pissed off than that. Especially for Max fucking Payne. How could the directer (or writer or whoever) fuck up that key point of the character? Ah fuck it, moving on.
Let’s talk about Mila Kunis as Mona Sax. For starters, for a character that’s supposed to be Russian, she has no accent. At all. None. This is made even more horrible by the fact that Mila Kunis is fucking Russian. To top it all off, Mona isn’t even Russian in the game. Let me rephrase this:
They made a character, not originally Russian, into a Russian, to be played by a Russian, without a Russian accent.
Moving on. In the game, Mona’s sister was an identical twin. In the movie, she’s played by Olga Kurylenko who, despite being Russian, actually has a Russian accent. Also, she’s, you know, not identical. And quite tall too, and pretty damned hot…but we’re getting off topic.
Like with Walberg, I think Mila is way to young to play Mona Sax. Mila looks like she’s in her very early 20’s, while in the game Mona appeared to be in her late 30’s or early 40’s (like Max). But in the end, also like Walberg, Mila does the best she can with what she had. In the end, both probably deserve more credit than what this movie can give them. They were both better than this shit. Now on to the bad of the bad.
Let’s talk about the villains. The villains in the film, like transgendered genitalia, are a jumbled mess. One might think a street dealer with the most addictive drug on the planet, that has an army of junkies, would be a suitable villain for Max Payne. How could you fuck that up? Lots of guys to kill! They don’t even need a name badge! Just “Junkie #1”. Boom, he’s dead! Nope, movie fucks that right up the poop chute. About 3/4 through the movie, it takes the crazed junkie leader who’s on Valkyr (the super-drug of the film) and shoots him. Not even by Max himself. He just dies, getting replaced in the final act with an evil and corrupted pharmaceutical company, the same company that Max’s wife worked for. Our main antagonist was a tattooed badass, and is now an old man in a business suit.
I dunno...I'd put my money on Beau Bridges.
Fuck it, I can’t go on, let’s finish this. Max gets high on Valkyr, storms a tall building, kills a lot of people, hallucinates, Mona just disappears in an elevator, Max kills Beau Bridges, and the movie ends. Just ends. He’s on his knees, surrounded by cops with guns trained on him. There’s no winding down, it just stops. It’s like the movie got tired of itself and committed suicide. Fuck this movie. It’s not even worthy of being used as a paperweight.If I had to rate this movie, I would give it…slug shit out of 10.
Join me next week for my next review as me and Jason Statham start our engines and take on Death Race…
Fuck.
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