Screenhead

Max Payne is one of those fairly pleasant movies that’ll require your brain to be partially malfunctioning to enjoy fully, but once you’ve had a couple vodka stingers or something similar, you’ll definitely be in a frame of mind to enjoy it.  After all, it takes a kind of brain damage to fully appreciate the bringing together of Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris, which if you’re playing Celebrity Bingo qualifies as a Royal Sampler.

See, Max Payne is one of those hard-boiled gumshoes that…oh, wait.  No. I’m thinking Humphrey Bogart.  Max Payne is a barely contained sociopath. And the reason why Max Payne is a barely contained sociopath is because his wife and baby were killed one fine day by drug addicts.  This left Max to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and use them to cut open the throats of pretty much every criminal that so much as wanders into frame.  As he progresses through this gigantic killing spree that will wind up bankrupting New York from the sheer number of lawsuits it’ll be facing, he’ll discover conspiracy in the hallowed halls of corporate power, extending even into his own department.

I remember my jaw dropping, slightly, when I found out Mila Kunis was in this—my exact words were, “My God, is that MILA KUNIS?”—because she is not who I think of when I think of action heroine.  Thankfully, she’s also not what the director thought of as an action heroine either because she’s not in this wreck for more than like ten minutes or so.

And someone needs to get Mark Wahlberg back into an acting class, hasta pronto, because his Max Payne will go about blasting the first thing he sees at literally any opportunity, and his facial expression will not even change when he does so. That may be the creepiest part of a movie where people on a regular basis hallucinate dark angels flying around and snatching them up and carving them into teeny bits.  Seriously, Mark—you want to change facial expression when you’re blasting those gangbangers with twelve-gauge buckshot fury?  Maybe arch an eyebrow or quirk the upper lip, something to show that the TAKING OF HUMAN LIVES ON A GRAND SCALE is registering in that hunk of dryer lint you laughingly call a soul?

That’s the creepiest part, by far.  The second creepiest part is how anyone accounts for the “valkyries” being hallucinations when they’re actually seen pulling people out of windows and cutting them into teensy bits.  The biggest problem with that, of course, is no one does.  This is why the bit of brain damage comes in handy, because then you won’t notice these teensy-tinsy gaping plotholes and will instead look at the monsters and gasp over how COOL they look.

Because they really DO look cool.

And that’s Max Payne in a nutshell.  It LOOKS cool.  It SOUNDS cool.  And if you’ve got a mild case of brain damage to ignore the massive structural failure that is a plorline, you’ll probably even find it cool.  And you’ll probably even be happy to note, that based on the ending, a sequel is almost certainly guaranteed.

Meanwhile the rest of us will go watch movies that don’t require a baseball bat to enjoy.

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