Max Payne.

[theweaselking]

The movie, not the game.

So: ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL AND EXTREMELY WELL DONE, for the first half. Sure, the dialogue is a little clunky, but it's Max Payne - it's meant to be half Raymond Chandler and half Will Eisner. And, visually, it's stunning. They don't miss a bet with the consistent and well-done fire and wing imagery, every time you see a number (on ANYTHING - street sign, precinct number, door number, graffiti, anything[1]) it's counting down, and even the softly falling snow acts more like ash in how it blows and it piles and how it stays. There's snow even on the running cars - mere internal combustion can't stand up to the art director, in this movie, and that's a good thing. Oh, and things are consistently Norse, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who's played the game or, well, watched the first half of this movie.

The second half, well - the first half is really, really, really good! Really good! And that's all I have to say about the second half.

Well, okay. If you insist: The second half feels like they ran out of time and budget, and they rushed. The dialogue goes from "a little clunky" all the way down the scale to "downright atrocious. No human would ever speak those lines". The lovely little "numbers are always counting down" thing disappears almost entirely, only to be remembered five minutes from the end (at "11") and then never seen again. The subtle wing motif in the light and shadow? Gone, there's just the real wings left. The plot? Explained in "as you know, Bob" expository lumps. The action? Pretty, but scenes range from ridiculous to anticlimatic without ever passing through "good".

And the mythological themes that tie the plot of the first half together? They're dropped pretty much wholesale, after Ragnarok[2]. And, unfortunately, that's not where the movie ends.

(And, frankly, the film suffered from a crying lack of Alfred Woden. He really did kind of need to be there. Spoiler: He wasn't.)

The verdict: Oh, man, the first half was really good. It's not like Will Smith Versus The Vampire People, where the first 90% was *perfect* and the last 10 minutes were unwatchable utterly inconsistent crapulence - the crap in Max Payne is longer, but it's much less bad. It's just a kind of generic action setpiece movie with nothing special to speak for it tacked on to a *very* nice buildup towards something better.

PS: Things I thought of when writing and then forgot to write originally:
* so, there's a new drug on the street that makes people high and fearless and makes them hallucinate, and there's graffiti related to it *everywhere* - and yet the cops have never heard of it?
* and it's distributed in test tubes clearly marked Aesir Pharma and yet nobody thinks to look at Aesir?
* and all the graffiti is straight from the game, meaning it's got syringes. And yet, the movie drug is taken orally.
* there are many police-related errors in this movie. This is one of them.


[1]: In a scene that feels like it was inserted after the fact, there are prices on a diner menu that don't hold this pattern. But that's the only one I saw, and I was watching for it.
[2]: If you don't know what I'm talking about, just trust me when I say that what I just said makes sense.

Comments

[chaosrah.livejournal.com]

My dad went and saw it with my Grandma tonight. Not sure why, but he said don't go see it I wouldn't like it. Not sure what that's supposed to mean...

[scixual.livejournal.com]

I just got back from watching it; I agree pretty much 98%.

It smacks of being one of those whose "Director's Cut" will improve all flaws.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Is Lupino in it? I dug his schtick.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Jack Lupino is indeed in the movie. His schtick is similar but different in several important ways - for one thing, he's not a blood-mad cultist of every god he can find in the alphabet. He's a blood-mad cultist of just one set of gods. For another, he's actually *less* crazy than most of the people high on Valkyr. Or, rather, he's crazy in a much more functional kind of way.

But yes. Lupino is there.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

Is there an endless ten minute stretch where Max has a dream vision where he has to jump back and forth and back again following a little green line through the darkness?

(Sorry... long held grudge against the original game as it exploded all the genre coolness).

I really really really want to see this film.. but the Will Smith vs the Vampire experience (where the trailer suggested they were going to do it picture perfectly and then the actual movie was as you said).. has me a bit concerned.

Ah well, maybe I can catch it in a matinee.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Little *red* lines, as I recall. But no, those aren't in the movie.

[scixual.livejournal.com]

...though I kept waiting...

Speaking of Will Smith Versus The Vampire People

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see the alternate ending to the movie? If so, does seeing the movie with that ending change your take on it any?

Also worth looking at is what vestiges of the original draft of the script (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v423/kafziel/iamlegend117.jpg) have surfaced. (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v423/kafziel/iamlegend118.jpg)

Re: Speaking of Will Smith Versus The Vampire People

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I did see the alternate. It was still bad and it still made no sense and it still didn't match up with the rest of the movie and it still didn't explain the massive plot holes involved in the woman and the child surviving despite being morons who don't know how vampires work and showing up *at a pier at midnight during a vampire attack*.

unwatchable utterly inconsistent crapulence

[graethorne.livejournal.com]

An artful turn of phrase, sir!

[runewise.livejournal.com]

Have you read I Am Legend? Really excellent little novella.

As for Max Payne, I'll take it as a renter. Thanks for the insight.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

In the game, there's a red sequence and a green sequence, and I really like the game as a whole, but those two bits were not great game play and they kind of don't fit in. The game is awesome in general though (I replayed it recently not even knowing it was being made into a movie).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I have read I Am Legend, yes. It's the source of most of my complaints about Will Smith Versus The Vampire People.

[runewise.livejournal.com]

Were they even Vampires in that movie?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

They slept during the day, killed the living, and burned when exposed to sunlight. They were vampire-ish.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

As much as they were in the novel, although perhaps *slightly* more like Dracula in that they were up and moving around during the day.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

I think in my brain I crossed the two, because the one with the most jumping was I *think* red as TWK pointed out.

Such a good game. I particularly loved the level of OMFG kidding me difficulty in the endings.

[runewise.livejournal.com]

I suppose I had a different picture of them in the novel than the one which was presented on the screen, is all.

[runewise.livejournal.com]

Yet for all of that, I was reminded more of the Rage Zombies of 28 Days Later than of any sort of feral vampire. And because of that, you knew they were going to Hollywood the ending of the movie.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Based on your earlier note, I saw Will in the Vampire movie and compared it to the book. Not only was the last 10% as craptastic as you claim, the entire movie suffers from a revisionist myopia that made me spittlingly angry.

Especially at The Absolute End. HORRIBLE. EVIL BASTARD MOVIE MAKERS.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

So if I were to go watch Max Payne without ever having played the game, would I be lost in any fashion?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No. They explain everything quite well. And, in the second half of the movie, more than once.

(torrain has never played the game, and had no problems.)

[lorelei76.livejournal.com]

I will have to respectfully disagree, theweaselking. This movie was merely alright -- good enough to rent, not good enough to watch in the theaters with $20 popcorn and soda combo. I watched this movie with a couple of friends -- none of us have ever played the game, or were at all familiar with the characters, so maybe that's why we found it a little lacking.

I actually sort of enjoyed the first half - there was some semblance of character development, and I'm always all about Marky Mark anyway. It started off as a detective pot-boiler type of movie - surprisingly interesting as I was expecting this to be a brainless shoot-em-up. But then, it's like the producers demanded a drawn out action sequence, and they just lost me completely. My favorite laugh out loud scene: thugs bust into the drug lab looking for Max Payne, and they start shooting up the lab. Then they set up the slow mo money shot and the bad guy shoots...at a table full of drugs 6 feet to the left of Max Payne. Does taking the Valkyr drug stuff make you a poor shot too?

Also, why the heck are the female characters So.DAmn.LAME.

Watching Mila Kunis attempt to hold an automatic machine gun (or whatever that was) with one hand, carrying it like it was a cute little purse, really cracked us up. A little later, 70's Show Girl get's all tough with Marky Mark and says somethign along the lines of 'You know what I do for a living. So watch it buddy" (definitely paraphrasing here). My friend whispers to me "No, actually I don't know what she does for a living. Is it the European import/export business?" I still don't know what her business is all about. Is she mafia? Drug running? Gun running?

Also, couldn't they have gotten better CGI artists? I loved the idea of the hallucinatory valkyries, but wow. The "special effects" were pretty unspecial.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you liked the same things about the first half that I did, and hated the same things about the rest of it.

[lorelei76.livejournal.com]

But I don't feel it was "ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL AND EXTREMELY WELL DONE, for the first half." It was pretty decent during the first hour - not ground breaking, but not gag-inducing either.

Then it went to shit fast. Oh man. Even Marky Mark kind of looked all "WTF is going on" halfway through.

[pyroofone.livejournal.com]

Going to see this.

"Fear gives men Wings."

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

I think that can be partially explained by their wish to homage both Heston and the novel.

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

Dammit, I'd resolved to avoid seeing it in th theatre but now you make me want to try it.