Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Payneful adaptation

If, like me, you’ve been waiting half of forever for a film based on a video game to transcend its wellspring in some significant way, I have news!

“Max Payne” is not that film.

Instead, like the depressingly long line of stunted video-games-turned-movies that it joins, it’s a watered-down shell in every meaningful way — plot, effects, dialogue, you name it.

Start with the PG-13 rating, which means hordes of characters can go down in hails of gunfire — if no blood is shown.

Clearly, this was a craven stab at pulling in the under-17 crowd. But not only does this fail to build on the game experience in any way, it’s a big regression from the gritty, realistic, hard-boiled violence of the games.

There’s also a little problem of time lag here; “Max Payne” the video game debuted in 2001, with a sequel arriving in 2003.

That’s, like, five years ago, dude! In videogamer world, it may as well be the Mesozoic Era. So most of the current under-17 crowd won’t know the game and won’t care about the movie, and the over-17 crowd that knows the game will come away from the movie severely disappointed.

The one thing the movie gets right is its look, which artfully re-creates the cold, cruel noirish world of the video games.

Most of the major game figures are here. Max (Mark Wahlberg, taking a big step down after “The Departed”) is a cop obsessed with solving the murder of his wife and baby three years earlier.

The trail leads to the Aesir Corp., a pharmaceutical firm where Max’s wife worked and where BB Hensley (Beau Bridges), a former policeman who once partnered with Max’s late dad, is now head of security.

Aesir is mixed up in a shady government project to develop a “super soldier” serum. But the drug is now on the streets, where former Marine and test subject Jack Lupino (Amaury Nolasco) is looking to corner the market by slaughtering the competition.

Max eventually gets help in his quest from femme fatale Mona Sax (Mila Kunis), whose sister was killed in the drug war crossfire, and police Lt. Jim Bravura (rapper Ludacris).

It’s a fine storyline for a video game. For an action film, not so much, especially when director John Moore, whose thin résumé’s one entry of note is 2001’s “Behind Enemy Lines,” and writer Beau Thorne, whose only Hollywood credit of any kind is this movie, are content to let the special effects do the work.

Too bad the effects are ho-hum, with only a few standout scenes, such as when Max downs some serum himself and launches into a hallucinogenic rage.

Fans of the “Max Payne” games surely will be awaiting a glimpse of “bullet time.” This feature — no doubt inspired by “The Matrix” — lets players slow the action for a limited time to the point that they can dodge bullets and return fire with deadly accuracy. But Moore and Thorne inexplicably trot out bullet time only once, and only for a few brief seconds.

Tack on an ending that’s anticlimactic in the extreme, especially stacked against the conflagration of destruction that closed the original game, and “Max Payne” the film, like so many of its brethren, can be summed up in one word: Pointless.

Rated PG-13 for violence, brief sexuality, drug references and language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.