MAX PAYNE

English (18PL) 16 October 2008

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Running Time: approx. 99 minutes

Director: John Moore

Producer: John Moore, Scott Faye, Julie Yorn

Writer: Beau Thorne

Casts: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris Bridges

Plot: Adapted from the Max Payne video game, it follows a New York cop whose wife and baby are killed by thugs high on a designer drug called Valkyr. Devastated, Max Payne joins the Drug Enforcement Agency and goes undercover with the mob to find the source of the drug. Framed for the murder of his partner and hunted down by both the mob and the police, he is forced to wage a one-man war against crime.

My Verdict:

Green Tea says:

Mark Wahlberg is the one guy whom you won't miss catching in if you talk about action movie...too good to be true that they pick the right guy for the role of the world's best first person shooter...Max Payne himself. Casting is good, but I can tell you something...only Mark Wahlberg is making himself everything in the movie. He is the only character helmer which impress me. I thought the girl featured in the trailer will help her in some way, but instead told to stay away and only appeared to give some stupid moral support for the hallucinated Max. The rest are just nothing but playing on other people's shoes and supporting each other dialogue.

The storyline is somehow too draggy, nothing much to expand on. The scripts do not explain everything in order well - tends to leave many stuffs unexplained. Can somebody expand on the really need to have a tattoo? Why no much details on Max's wife really work on what before her death? What is the main motive for the assassin to do all the killing for? Merely to demonstrate how drugs really affect the people? I find its like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces, and a little bit confusing. The worst thing to say is that the games element in Max Payne has gone!!!

I have to say this on the other hand, the cinematography work is good while the effect is equally stunning. What is so fascinating that how the work to bring the hallucination to live is simply amazing. Also the story feels amazingly cool with the weather that the production team decided to create - the snowing and raining atmosphere. If you are Max Payne game lover, you will find this piece of work brilliant but at the same time feels grumpy because time bullet and slo-mo are totally vanished. For non-lover, it will be putting question marks on your head, might end up lost in translation as well.

CAST -3.5 stars

STORYLINE - 3.0 stars

CINEMATOGRAPHY - 4.0 stars

EFFECTS - 4.0 stars

an overall >> 3.5 stars