Movie Review: Max Payne

This is one of those movies where for most of the two long hours you sit and wonder why?. Why with all that money they didn’t spend more time on the script. Why with a star like Mark Wahlberg they didn’t, well, spend more time on the script. It’s easy to forgive a film with a lousy story that at least dazzles with snazzy action set-pieces, but Max Payne boasts nothing of the sort. It’s a dull, leaden, action-less movie — an empty Happy Meal — easy to market but nothing inside.

Mark Wahlberg plays the title character, a widowed NYPD cold-case homicide detective who’s been tracking the killer of his wife and newborn son for three years. When a murder involving the supernatural piques the interest of Payne’s former partner Alex (Donal Logue), a tattoo of the victim links to the murder of Payne’s family, but before Alex can say, Meet me tonight so I can give you this important information, Alex is killed and the plot lumbers about with Payne piecing it together.

This is one of those movie where at a funeral, Alex’s widow slaps Payne across the face. One of those movies where the older mentor (Beau Bridges) is- well, I don’t want to give it away, but the story’s as predictable as the outcome of a CNN Fact Check on Sarah Palin.

The plot has no momentum and Wahlberg’s character is so distant and blandly determined you can’t make an emotional connection even though his terrible loss is worked over pretty hard throughout. As bland and unimaginative as the plotting is, the look of the film, which is photographed using an institutional green hue, works you over like a sleeping pill. This is a very difficult film to sit through.

And maybe it was me but the supernatural elements never added up or came to make any sense. The idea is that a narcotic of some kind is required to see devilish, giant, killer hawks that turn from shadow to flesh. But they also seem to have the power to cross over into reality. This sets up an expectation that never pays off. Instead, you get poorly choreographed gunfights as opposed to Payne going toe-to-toe with these things. The big, numbing finale involving the arch-villain is nothing more than a gunfight between middle-aged men and the whole supernatural concept’s all but dropped.

In this horrible cinematic era of hyper-meterosexuality Mark Wahlberg is a real gift — and one who can act. Thanks to a performance which perfectly balanced pathos and bad ass, The Big Hit (1997) remains one of the best action films of that decade. Wahlberg was also the best thing in The Perfect Storm (2000), The Italian Job (2003), and The Departed (2006). But Max Payne represents — after The Happening, Shooter, and We Own The Night — his fourth bad choice in a row. Someone needs new management.

Somehow the film manages to completely waste Mila Kunis who, in this summer’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, stole the show by being all kinds of fetching. Better used is Olga Kurylenko who has a small but memorably sexy role as a plot device in a silky red dress. For those of us counting the days to the next Bond film in which she stars as the main Bond babe, her seductive work here portends schwing-worthy things.

Finally, the conspiracy surrounding the narcotic is part of an experiment conducted on the United States Military. In order to win the War On Terror (or as its probably described in the script: “the so-called War On Terror”) this narcotic is developed to turn our troops into vicious, fearless fighting machines. All of this has been approved by a President Shrub.

Okay, I made the Shrub part up.