Oh dear.

Yes, Max, we all feel that way about your movie.

I think the entire sum of the movie can be described with those two words, which in itself should be a suitable omen of things to come: While, admittedly, my standards were set fairly low to begin with — as one must do when dealing with movies based upon games — much of my disappointment lies in the significant change of style. Max Payne – the game — was moody, dark, atmospheric, and had a heavy influence from film noir; the movie, contrastingly, is a plodding and clumsily-constructed effort that seems unable to decide what it’s trying to be, and missing the mark entirely along the way.

I’m at such a loss for words, in fact, that it’s hard to know what else to say: Any element of the dark, brooding, noir atmosphere from the host game has been thoroughly stripped away, along with the story which seems to have been largely re-written into something shallower than a puddle and about as interesting. This is unfortunate, since the vast majority of said movie focuses heavily on the bumbling attempt of a story, while the remarkably few action sequences manage the seemingly impossible, as they garner even less interest than the rest. Some of the “special” effects are frankly laughable, such as the scene where Max — having just dispatched two nameless thugs with a pump-action shotgun — bends over backwards and takes out a third on the walkway above and behind him, as if trying and failing to mimic a Matrix-like stunt.

I found the whole experience to be thoroughly dull and a pale shadow of what it could have been; the reinvention of the drug Valkyr — a major plot device in the original game — into a failed experiment at creating super-soldiers (oh, I’m sorry, was that a spoiler?) is a tired and yawn-inducing plot device that has been done so much better in, oh, just about everything else, and while the experience is almost partially salvaged by the hallucinations involving jet-black angels of death — valkyries, we’re led to believe, though they hardly fit the profile — this whole aspect is both inadequately explained and largely wasted.

Overall, an abysmally bland, entirely forgettable attempt.

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