Max Payne and the hope for a good video game adaptation.

18Oct08

I saw Max Payne.  The movie.  Not the actual Max Payne.  I imagine seeing a tangible Max Payne would be akin to seeing John Rambo.  As in it would be the last thing you see.  Anyway, what the hell am I talking about? I’ll tell you what, thanks for asking.

I played Max Payne to reimmerse myself in the Max Payne narrative.  Dark, brooding, suffocating, hopeless.  It’s certainly noir.  Cheesy, yet poetic.  The movie is a great adaptation of the video game.  It’s not the best adaptation, but the general themes are there.  Happy go lucky guy comes home and finds his doting wife and adorable baby killed by drugged up white trash.  Max Payne hunts relentlessly for those behind his wife’s inexplicable murder.  Happens to be very good with weapons and, to correlate with pulse-pounding gameplay, Marky Payne has the strange ability to make bullets miss him wildly.  There’s plenty of noirish bits, Max Payne is injured early and often; everyone around him is either dead or is out to get him; it’s gloomy, whether it be rain (wtf?) or snow (that’s more like it).  Why it couldn’t be ALL snow I assume was part of a Hollywood mandate to note the adverse affects of global warming.
Though the game has the better story, it would seem terribly unoriginal if they did it now.  In the game Max Payne, with a suicidal recklessness, goes undercover as a mafia goon.  All evidence of his existence prior to his going undercover is erased.  Max Payne the police dick died along with his family.  Max Payne the mafia dick lives on.  An original concept, to be sure.  Certainly a fresh endeavor for Marky Mark.  Though, I think the movie would have worked better if they tried the undercover mafia route.  Who gives a shit if they’re called out on jocking the Departed.  They already worked so hard to endear themselves to the fans of the games.

So, there goes a major part of the story, because now they have to rethink Max Payne’s place in the world.  In the movie, it happens to be the lone detective in the Cold Case cellar.  The plot after that is your typical war on drugs hunt for the ne’er-do-wells.  Though Sul, Tim and I thought that Mona wasn’t in the first game, and was therefore wedged into the story as awkwardly as Mila Kunis playing a badass Russian assassin.  I remember that she is in the first game, placed much more sensibly as an underworld hitwoman.  It’s just the movie that made Mona’s existence pointless.  The more I think about it, the movie hurt bad from not following the game story.  The police were against Max Payne in both for the death of Alex Balder.  But the game had it better, with Balder one of the few that knew that Max Payne was undercover.  I suppose past the riveting gameplay, the story actually may have held up.  Yep, that settles it, not cribbing The Departed really screwed this movie.  That and there was only about 3 gunfights, neither of them good.  They couldn’t even bother ripping off the Matrix.  Or better yet, Equilibrium.  I suppose that’s a lesson in what movies do crib from video games, when Max Payne can’t even use Bullet Time in the Max Payne movie without seeming to rip off a movie that had bullet time akin to what they saw in Max Payne the game.

Though I did like the hallucinations that Max underwent in the movie, much better than that in the game.  Especially since in the game his hallucinations involved platform jumping on narrow paths of blood.  And Mark Wahlberg was a pretty good Max Payne.  Just goes to show that movies based on video games have a long way to go.  Hopefully the path won’t be as torturous and criminal as the that of video games based on movies.

As a final note, the Norse mythology was incorporated pretty well in the mythos of Max Payne.  Balder, whose death signals Ragnarok.  The Aesir, the Norse pantheon.  Obviously Valkyries were the Norse Reapers.  In the game the guy that patrons you is Woden (Odin), an old one-eyed man with a lot of influence. Purdy cool if you’re into a work chock that revels in its theme.  Am I right? Anyone? Hello?

Future (long time no see) out.

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Tags: Mark Wahlberg, Max Payne, Movies, Video Games