Max Payne was really cool, if you’re into hot babes, tattoos, and you like your shoot-em-ups on the tepid side. I watched the unrated version, and I wonder what all the fuss was about.This was not a particularly well liked film by many reviewers. It got only 18% on RottenTomatoes.com, and comments like this were common:
No high-octane, fast-paced shoot ’em up this, Max Payne may well be the most tedious trip to a cinema you make all year. Truly, the minutes pass like hours. It’s akin to one of those straight-to-DVD titles you only ever find in petrol stations. (RottenTomatoes.com)
My take on this was that, since I enjoyed the Max Payne game series, I would give it the benefit of the doubt. Even so, I found this film adaptation to be slow moving, and I’m not sure that Wahlberg injected enough grit into the title role. The film ended up being a pretty standard man on a mission flick – and a predictable one at that. Without giving away too much, I can say that as soon as the mystery antagonist appeared on screen, we knew where the film was heading.
On the plus side, there are some hot babes and neat tattoos, and some of the gunfight scenes were pretty good. But there was too little of all of these to overcome the general sense of malaise that I found myself in by 1 hour mark.
