Max Payne (dir: John Moore)

I didn’t walk into Max Payne knowing that the film was based on a video game until the end credits rolled. At that time it didn’t come as any shock, given its combination of high concept premise, boilerplate revenge plot and heavy reliance on gunfire to solve the hero’s (and, for that matter, everybody’s) problems. But given the visual style, I thought it might have been a graphic novel. The images look like a Frank Miller comic brought to life more successfully than the graphically striking but cinematically static “Sin City.” Designed with strong lines and bold backgrounds, filled in with heavy swathes of muted color, and composed in stark contrasts of light and dark, this is a live action comic book. Only not as smart as most.

Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis unleash their firepower

Detective Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is the kind of hard-boiled, impassive cop more prone to pulp fiction than any kind of reality. His wife was killed and his baby was either killed or kidnapped (the film isn’t clear on which) three years ago and now he’s the force pariah, wrapped up in grief and rage and revenge and blaming everyone else for not getting the one guy who got away (Max reacted with his gun blazing before he actually had any idea what was going on – luckily, he guessed right and plugged two of the three scumbags). Now he’s in self-imposed exile in the Cold Case room, going over dead files of dead-end cases while continuing his own personal investigation to find his wife’s killer. Everyone else in the force thinks he’s guilty of something (again, of what is unclear) so when he’s connected to two homicides in as many days, Payne’s own fellow officers act like they’ve been vindicated for their behavior.

Meanwhile there’s a whole subplot of a supernatural underworld connected  to the criminal underworld, shadows of winged creatures hounding and haunting and running to ground a feral tribe of drug addicts who seem to be following the orders of a demonic high priest (Amaury Nolasco) who was once, we discover, an American soldier in the front lines in the war on terror. Now he’s the survivor of a failed super-soldier experiment he seems to be continuing on his own terms.

It wasn’t a heavily plotted film to begin with, but there are things that were either left on the cutting room floor (is Chris O’Donnell’s three-year-old daughter – a fact so awkwardly established that it must mean something – in fact Max’s possibly kidnapped child?) or simply forgotten about (Max is suddenly out of his handcuffs when he makes his escape on the docks).  And in some cases, it simply discards logic or story coherence so the firepower can be unleashed in all its explosive glory. How else would Mila Kunis stroll into a high security high rise office building toting a friggin’ machine gun?
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