Two cardinal rules for the proper care and maintenance of
Mark Wahlberg: Never let him play a humorless badass, and never cast him in the
lead role. Under the right circumstances, when just a spark in a larger
ensemble (even Boogie Nights, an exception, surrounds him with a lot of people), he can
be thrilling to watch, especially when his masculinity looks more like boyish
petulance, as it does in I Heart Huckabees, The Departed, and Three Kings. But ask him to carry a movie like The
Truth About Charlie, Planet Of The Apes,
or the joyless new videogame-to-movie adaptation Max Payne, and he's a block of wood in need
of Geppetto. While it's asking too much for him to save a fashionably bleak,
derivative, nonsensical film like Max Payne, his tight-lipped, inaccessible
performance as a detective-turned-vigilante certainly doesn't help.
Wahlberg stars as Max Payne, a maverick detective and
dark-eyed anti-hero who, as his name suggests, wouldn't be the good half of a
good-cop/bad-cop scenario. Relegated to deskwork after his family and former
partner are murdered, Wahlberg uses his investigative instincts to figure out
what happened to them, but isn't afraid to go above the law to seek justice.
Teaming up with unlikely ally Mila Kunis, a Russian mobster and assassin,
Wahlberg finds the answer may lie in a potent experimental drug called Valkyr,
which is being used to turn soldiers into powerful, fearless killing machines.
It also—and here's where things get needlessly confusing—summons
winged horsemen from Norse mythology, and they may or may not be
hallucinations.
The winged horsemen are only the most prominent example of Max
Payne sacrificing
everything—coherence, suspense, mirth—at the altar of super-cool
effects. A big reason why videogame-to-movie adaptations are currently batting
.000, other than Uwe Boll's prolificacy, is that filmmakers work so hard at
recreating a game's look that they ignore the obvious problem of assembling a
bunch of lame cutscenes into a story. Director John Moore (2006's The Omen, Flight Of The Phoenix), whose lack of originality has
become a signature, does a fine enough job of integrating the game's "bullet
time" effect into the action. But in a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of
slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.