Over the weekend I managed to talk N into watching Max Payne with me.  I’m always surprised when he agrees to watch one of my Netflix movies.  He completely refuses with most of the stuff in my queue.  Unfortunately, I have a feeling he’ll go back to refusing me for a while after this one.  It wasn’t horrible, but it certainly was not the greatest movie ever.  (Spoilers after the jump.  Consider yourself warned!)

The feel of the movie (and even certain elements of the plot) reminded me of Constantine, which I hated.  It was all very dark.  Now, I’m totally fine with that.  However, it is the supernatural aspect I have a problem with – as in, this drug caused 99% of the people taking it to have the exact same demonic hallucination?  Seems unlikely.  I suppose that maybe I didn’t know what to expect since I’ve never played the video game, but I doubt that would have changed my opinion too much.  I just wanted to see this because A) action movie and B) Mark Wahlberg.

The beginning was very slow.  Twenty minutes in and we were both shocked to find that it had ONLY been 20 minutes.  It seemed more like an hour.  Honestly, the whole movie was kind of that way.  The very end was really the only part that had a significant amount of action.

Like most mothers, I’m not big on movies or TV shows where dead children are a part of the plot.  But as N pointed out, in this movie they focused more on the death of Payne’s wife and glossed over the baby, so that made it tolerable for me.

I think it is entirely possible that I’ve seen way too many films of this genre, because I knew who the bad guy was when he first appeared on screen (in a decidedly un-bad guy capacity).  Well, either I’ve seen too many movies or I’ve become psychic.  Equally likely, I suppose.

Overall Max Payne was watchable, and parts of it were mildly entertaining.  It was not even close to being the worst Mark Wahlberg movie I’ve ever seen – that honor goes to Planet of the Apes – but it certainly wasn’t anywhere near the best.  I’ll give it 2.5 stars out of five, placing it somewhere higher than Shooter but lower than The Big Hit on my Completely Arbitrary Mark Wahlberg Movie Rating Scale.

Now you know.