A film adaptation in 2008, loosely set around events of the first Max Payne, did little to further the prospects of the franchise – it currently holds a 5.3 score on IMDB.īut age is a healer – perhaps not for Max, the character, but certainly Max the videogame giant (at the time of writing, Max Payne 3 has just entered the UK sales chart at number one). The first two games in this chronologically scripted trilogy of third-person shooters were well received by critics but neither is ubiquitous in the collections of PS2 and Xbox gamers, and the second game sold poorly enough for its publisher Take-Two Interactive to reforecast its 2004 finances. The big push behind Max Payne 3 could be seen to represent a risk: a pill-popping alcoholic with considerable personal demons? Cool, sign me up for that. Developer Rockstar Games ( Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, etc) is rarely an outfit to do things by halves – and the advertising campaign, pre-release video trailers and general hullabaloo surrounding this latest instalment in the series following a New York cop steadily losing his loved ones, his own lust for life and, if played particularly badly, the use of his lungs, shows all the signs of a blockbuster.īut unlike Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, Max Payne isn’t a particularly high-profile IP, not compared to several other character-led releases from the last generation of consoles. The biggest videogame release of 2012’s first six months is, surely, Max Payne 3. And considering that "Marky Mark," Ludacris, and Nelly Furtado are all in this cast, I wonder if Max Payne might have worked better as a musical. But aside from accepting the role in the first place, I can't fault him or any of the other actors-well, except perhaps the laughably awful performance from Beau Bridges. Night Shymalan's recent bomb, The Happening. Payne is played by Mark Wahlberg, whose career has taken a serious nosedive between this and M. In a world where visuals rule and moviemaking budgets are tight, director John Moore (responsible for the slightly less atrocious Behind Enemy Lines and pointless remakes of The Omen and Flight of the Phoenix) and the filmmakers apparently felt that the movie could get by on the "strength" of its dramatic storytelling. And with virtually no action for the first hour of the film, it's a tediously paced action film at that. What does that leave? A clichéd cop action movie based on a game about cop action movie clichés. ![]() Yet as stylish and fun as the storytelling and game-play were, with a tongue-in-cheek name like Max Payne, the game was clearly an homage to action classics rather than a serious story.Īs a movie, the game is gone, and with it, surprisingly, most of the action. It played like a graphic novel heavily influenced by action movie clichés, particularly John Woo films and The Matrix with its nifty ability to slow down time, leaping with guns blazing while dodging the enemy's bullets. As a video game, Max Payne was fairly groundbreaking for its time, offering a cool, but gritty crime noir about a New York City cop driven to the edge by the murder of his family.
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