Movie Month: Max Payne (Part 2)

Go read Part 1 here. 

When we left off, detective Max Payne, prime suspect in two murders, finally had a lead that could solve the mystery that’s plagued his life. Everyone involved with the Valkyr drug has a wing tattoo, and so did one of the bastards that broke into his home the day of Michelle Payne's murder; it may have had something to do with the production of the drug. Alas, her personal files at Aesir Pharmaceuticals have disappeared.

"The files are missing!"
"No, you must be imagining things."

"At the time, the Payne household was so bright, it was
like someone put a yellow filter on their home."

Max reports to B.B. Hensley about the missing files, which indicates that someone at Aesir knows he’s snooping around. B.B. talks to Internal Affairs Lieutenant Jim Bravura, and explains in better detail to both Ludacris and the audience what happened three years prior at the Payne household. Three thugs broke in, Max killed two of them, but arrived too late to rescue Michelle. The killer fled through the window. B.B. then tells Bravura that Max might be targeting Aesir now.

Sure enough, next scene, we get confirmation that the higher-ups at Aesir, Nicole Thorne and her right-hand man Jason Colvin, know about Jack Lupino, the guy distributing the Valkyr drug on the street. Meanwhile, Bravura shows up at Aesir to investigate the case of Michelle Payne on his own. When Colvin arrives at work, Max is there, ready to interrogate about the last thing his wife Michelle worked on before she died. The interrogation begins amicably, but then Max rips pages from the Jack Bauer interrogation handbook: “Punch the guy until he talks.”

"Allow me to introduce myself; I'm the guy at the end of
this fist. If you don't answer my questions, you're going to
find yourself at the other end of it."

Hm... an entire group of trained shooters, versus a single
man. Based on all the fiction I've seen, I'm placing my
bet on the single man.

Not recommendable, but we can’t argue with results. Colvin admits that Michelle had learned a bit too much on a secret super-soldier serum that Aesir was contracted to create and mass-produce. The serum only achieved its effect in 1% of the test subjects, with the others merely getting a high followed by hallucinations. Colvin has more information, but can only reveal it outside of the office. However, after hearing the fight, people outside Colvin's office called B.B.’s security office for help, and B.B. sends a SWAT team into the Aesir building.

Colvin can say more, but can’t do it in the Aesir offices, so Max takes him like a hostage and also leaves with a file that contains the information on the failed super-soldier serum. But before they can leave, they come face-to-face with the SWAT team… which proceeds to shoot Colvin down. A shootout follows in which the SWAT team fails to hit Payne, and he in return kills several of them. Bravura, caught in the middle of the action, tries to reason with Max, but to no avail.

Extreme slow-mo of a guy shooting a rifle backwards?
Sure, why not.

The games had a special gameplay element around Max: When he was in a shootout, the player could slow down time to give the NYPD detective an edge. It allowed the quick shoot and reload of the firearm, and also slowed down the opponents to make them easier targets. It’s meant as a tribute to the action scenes in slow-motion, those from John Woo's cinematography in particular. The effects team behind this film tried to invoke the effect, by using a camera that recorded at 1,000 frames per second, creating a slow-motion effect. And then, they used it only twice in the whole film. Talk about a wasted opportunity.

Seeing this video of Lupino before he went crazy on Valkyr,
and comparing it to what he's become, feel like the basis
for one of those "Meth. Not even once." drug PSAs.

"This is the worst movie night I've ever been to.
We don't even have popcorn."

Max sneaks into Mona Sax’s headquarters and they watch the video file he took from Colvin’s office. It’s evidence of the Valkyr drug being used by the military to make soldiers unbeatable on the battlefield, only for it to backfire horribly. The most notable interviewee is Jack Lupino. The ex-soldier was one of the rare few who got the intended effect of the drug. He still got the high and the visions of Valkyries, but also became a killing machine. Figuring that Lupino is responsible for Michelle's death, Max wants to go to the Ragnarock club... but alone; he has a death wish, Mona doesn't.

Yep, it's like I said. This is the "after taking drugs" part
of the drug PSA.

In Ragnarock, the disgraced cop finds a factory of Valkyr production. After killinga rmed guards, he ventures deeper into the facility and is sneak-attacked by Lupino. the ex-soldier is about to deal a killing blow... only to be killed by bullets to the chest and falls over. In walks B.B., coming just in time to rescue Max! Weird how the serum-enhanced dealer didn’t seem to acknowledge any sort of connection with Max…

The nicest guy was the villain all along? A lot of mystery
stories pull that, sure - but they also have, y'know...
CLUES! and EVIDENCE! to support the twist!

Seems like everything’s alright, but as they leave, Max gets knocked out by B.B.’s assistant Joe Salle. They take the detective to the nearby docks. B.B., the Backstabbing Bastard, admits that he’s the one responsible for Michelle Payne’s death, as she had been snooping around too much. Orchestrating a murder was, apparently, the only good solution to the problem. And B.B. took a liking to this method of dealing with the people that bother him. Points for following a twist from the game, yes – but there were barely any hints that B.B. was responsible in the film. The flash back to the flashback was also some bullshit. 

That. Right there. Bullshit. 

The only giveaway is that B.B. was quick to send a SWAT team knowing that he was likely sending them to kill Max. B.B. and Joe try to send Max drowning into the freezing river with weights attached to him, even planting two vials of Valkyr in his pocket to misguide the NYPD if they find him; but the protagonist manages to escape, jumping into the river himself to flee. Figuring he won’t get out of that alive, B.B. and his henchman leave. That wasn’t counting on Max hearing the ghost of his wife telling him that it’s not his time yet (because we needed to pile on another absurd cliché to the story), which gives him a second wind, enough to swim back to the docks. 

Valkyr can reheat a human's body? Well that's new.

Reminder that this is happening during winter, so he’s struck heavily by hypothermia. Without hesitation, Max downs both vials of Valkyr, a crazy idea which, for some reason, works. Strengthened, he gets up, just as the drug-fueled hallucinations begin – the snow and the skies turn orange, and the black-winged monsters appear. I had almost forgotten that there was color in this movie!

McCaffrey as an FBI agent going "who are you?" to an
overzealous police department cop is oddly satisfying.

After the events at Aesir, Jim Bravura has begun an investigation, treating it as the murder of Jason Colven and attempted murder of Max Payne. And, although it displeases the NYPD, he’s got the goddamn FBI helping him. I’ll give the movie that much, it has a nice uncredited cameo of James McCaffrey, Max Payne’s voice actor in the games, as Jack Taliente, the FBI agent on the case. That’s pretty cool. However, an informant in the NYPD calls B.B. to tell him. The head of security at Aesir could deal with one rogue detective, but the FBI? Fuck that!

Rig a downtown building full of explosives to stop one
person. Yeah, sounds reasonable.

They try to leave by the underground parking lot, but Max ambushes them. Barely surviving, B.B. and Joe run back to the elevator and reach the helipad. Stopping by the security office, B.B. tells Joe to set up explosives to blow the place up and, hopefully, Max Payne with it. Good old C4, because there’s no kill like overkill. Meanwhile, Max tears through wave after wave of guards, tripping balls and seeing winged monsters and orange, desolate landscapes around him, even imagining the ceiling tearing apart at one point.

There. I captured as a gif the only part of the film that you need to see.

…Okay, that shot was pretty cool. 

While he’s hallucinating, he doesn’t pay attention to another guard coming closer for an easy kill, but Mona shows up and saves the detective. She goes to deal with the C4-setting Joe while Max seeks his prime target. Oh, and he’s still tripping.

The night sky has a nice shade of "burning hatred"
orange right now.

It only took an hour and 24 minutes into this film before I had something interesting to show. 

B.B., you said you've come to love the taste of death so
much - how about you get some of it yourself?

Mona wounded Joe but was attacked by more guards, so she had to flee, allowing Joe to detonate the bombs. That must be a very resistant building if it can hold together in spite of that explosion, and B.B., up there, at the helipad, barely felt it. Speaking of, Max arrives up there. B.B. barely tries to reason with his ex-partner’s kid, and goes down in one shot. At peace, Max lands on his knees, just as the FBI team arrives to rescue/arrest him, which coincides with the rise of a new day and the end of snowfall. Did I mention the symbolism? 

Don't worry, the FBI agents are nice; if the post-credits scene
is to be believed, Max is alive, well... ...and not behind bars!

Credits roll, but wait! It’s not over! There’s yet another item we haven’t crossed off the checklist of mandatory elements of a crappy video game film. We need a sequel hook that will lead nowhere due to poor reception and box-office entries! A post-credits scene informs the viewer that Max, who has somehow escaped prison in spite of killing so many people, has allied with Mona to hunt down the CEO of Aesir, Nicole Horne. 

New target acquired.

Half the time, until the end, you can
barely see the details of the "Valkyries".

God… damn… it. This was terrible. It gets a couple points for effort, but that doesn’t salvage it nearly enough to be considered even mediocre. There was some ambition for the product, too. The use of a camera that takes 1000 pictures per second in order to mimic the Bullet Time, a key feature of the games? It’s used twice only. The hallucinations? The studio held a contest between multiple visual effect teams to see who could come up with the best images for the scenes in which the viewers see the effects of Valkyr. The creatures are either shadows or all black, so difficult to see in the dimly-colored shots of the film, and as a result, you can barely see any of their details until Max’s drug-fueled carnage at the end.

Ludacris is an acclaimed actor - he's been in
many films that are so much better than this one.

As for the actors’ performances, we can barely talk about effort – Mark Wahlberg tries to convey the complex emotions of a tortured cop, but winds up looking like little more than an angry frowning man for most of the film. Mila Kunis tries, but she can’t quite sell herself as an assassin, even though I learned through my research that she was taught some crazy skills to act the part. Most performances feel phoned in, at best. I do like some of the risks taken in casting, such as Ludacris as Jim Bravura – in fact, he’s one of the few who seems to give a damn here. And giving James McCaffrey a cameo? That's awesome.

I’ve complained a few times about the dimmed colors in the film. The noir (and neo-noir) genre has a style associated to it. It’s usually a mystery with a crime to solve and clues to gather, but a part of the focus is put on every character’s moral ambiguity. Shades of grey abound. There's a way to show this through the film’s visuals. The solution isn’t to dim most of the colors and leave only a few bright ones in, such as Olga Kurylenko’s red dress or the bright blue Valkyr liquid. Or the yellow hellscape seen by Max at the end. Yes, attracting the viewer’s attention on a bright color is a good trick; but it doesn't replace good cinematopgraphy.

Hell, for a neo-noir story, this isn’t even a good mystery! Most of the details linking the wing tattoos (including the one seen on the thugs who broke into the Payne household), the Valkyr drug, and Aesir Pharmaceuticals would have been very easy to notice by the NYPD, and the Valkyr distribution ring could have gone down in a snap. To be fair, through the film, the villains do their best to keep the clues away from Max Payne, killing everyone who might say something. And in the end, who killed Max’s family? B.B. Hensley, who was set up as the one reasonable guy in the story, only to reveal himself as a scheming, monologuing, murder-happy psychopath out of nowhere! Even the reveal that he was Michelle’s murder is half-assed! 

Fuck that one precise shot. I watched the film again, His face never appears in the glass during the flashback showing the night of Michelle Payne’s death. For the record, it's the same twist in the game, but there, B.B. is a VERY different character and it's more believable that he'd done it.

And to top it all off, the movie uses the references to Norse mythology as a crutch, flooding the story with them, and leading to some sort of payoff – or so the viewer would hope. We do get some cool effects during Max’s climactic drug trip, but that’s all – the Norse references are never taken further than that. All we get is empty symbolism. In comparison, the first game sets up these references and parallels to Ragnarok, the end of the world, with meaningful names and story beats, and it all pays off. To be fair, the games have a lot more time to set things up, far more time than a 100-minute movie would. Hell, the drug is injected in the games, but drunk out of vials in the film. The makers of the film didn’t even bother changing the graffiti to remove the syringes in the graffiti seen all over the place! 

I really, really don’t recommend it. You'e not missing out on anything if you don't watch this one. Urgh, I feel like I need a palate cleanser after this. I need something that actually has some goddamn color.