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Just saw it over the weekend - and hated it!

Here's a review I wrote:

Max Payne is a celebrated game, and with its film-noir/graphic novel roots, becomes an easy property to adapt for a movie. Yet, Uwe Boll... no, John Moore botched it up. The movie plays out like a cheaply-written foreword to what a real movie could have been. Although the visuals are spot-on, with muted and gray colors, bleak and contrasting visuals and especially the way the camera follows Max Payne in most of his movements, just like the game, that is all the movie picks of what made the game a success. The game’s omnipresent voice-over narration by the titular character did begin the movie, but it dies a natural death hardly ten minutes in.

Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg, back in Happening mode) is an NYPD detective whose family was left murdered one fateful day. He spends subsequent months hunting for one escaped killer. The movie picks up from when the dead-case heats up, and Max finds himself episodically partnered with a female assassin out of high-school.

Max Payne really has nothing to go for it. The story itself takes you nowhere and the action sequences – the main expectation from this movie – leave a lot to be desired. Mark Wahlberg himself evokes no empathy or sympathy as we mechanically follow him from point to point in an inactive trance. The absurd obviousness of the antagonists for the audience also makes the entire runtime of the movie a ritual waste. To make it worse, all the “cool shots” were used up for the trailer. It ends up like a dream-less sleep – a lot of time goes by being inactive, but you are still tired at the end of it. Eventually, the anticipated end-credits come as a blessing.

Eventually, the only thing to remember about this movie will be the effective use of Marilyn Manson’s “If I was your Vampire” for its trailer.

My Rating --> 1 of 5

i am not familiar with the game, so i have to judge it from the movie itself. it was ok,, it picked up as soon as the girl vanessa vax dies. still cant figure out why lupino would be going around killing the people with tattoos, or maybe i missed the part explaining it. one uberfantastic is max leaning/falling back while firing the shotgun and hitting the bad guy (when he cant see the guys, wow), and the bad guy firing off 2 clear shots but not hitting max.

it is entertaining, being a guy all i need is gunshot and blood, and some skin, so it works for me. not top notch, but fair enough.

i liked eagle eye (shia lebeouf) better but only slightly.

3 our of 5 for me.

That uberfantastic was just one super slo-mo shot. And there was one at the end when Max fires his pistol to kill the Big Bad guy. There was hardly any worthy action in it man!

The Lupino part - no you didn't miss anything. The movie makes no sense at all.

I'll try to catch Eagle Eye in the next few days and report back on it.