[Movie Saturday] The Max Payne movie

If there is a list out there named "Best videogames with the worst names ever", Max Payne is definitely high up that list, alongside such games as Banjo-Tooie and The Legend of Zelda: Link's and Terra's Excellent Adventure. Seriously, naming a shooter game, and even its protagonist, Max Pain... That takes balls. Huge, gigantic, balls.

Max Payne and its 2003 sequel are highly stylized third-person shooters, with a presentation that's quite different to most games, and the first game to incorporate "that Matrix slow-motion thing" effect in its gameplay. So effectively in fact that this effect has ever since been called Bullet Time, a name first coined by the developers of this game.


Max Payne is effectively a film noir game, with its story focusing on a framed cop with an aptitude for brooding monologues. One of the most impressive aspects of the game's presentation were the cutscenes, which were presented in the form a page ripped directly out of a graphic novel, with speech bubbles and all. While the story itself was fairly convoluted and quite frankly bonkers, as a rule of the thumb, I prefer a pretentious yet witty story over a completely brainless one. And seeing a shooter with a story that's not utterly brainless was definitely a welcome change.


As I was reading through the manual of the very first Max Payne all the way back in 2002, I noticed something very interesting; it was alluding to a Max Payne movie that was already in the works and should have been released "soon". Well, fast forward seven years after that piece was written (in 2001, for you math types out there), we're finally getting this movie. It will be based on the first movie, Valkyr drug and all, with a few rumored aspects of the second game making it as well.

The cast looks solid, Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg is set to play Max and has proved himself to be a very competent actor, with gruff, brooding characters being something of a specialty of his. And then there's Mila Kunis who's... well, hot. I'm a bit worried about the director though, John Moore, who was responsible for such atrocities as Behind Enemy Lines and the 2006 version of The Omen, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.


What I'm really worried about, however, is the movie's rating, which has been confirmed to be a PG-13. I honestly do not get it. The original game is a dark, violent tale of a man's bloody and gory path towards redemption. There's a lot of violence, swearing, and everything else you might expect from such a tale. A PG-13 all but ensures that the movie will have little of those. Hell, you can't even have an actor smoke a cigarette anymore with that rating. It seems you can't do anything fun in a movie these days anymore without having the censors running after you.

Stop!

That blows my mind, really. I'm not a violent person (that incident where I broke a PS2 controller while playing P.E.S notwithstanding), in fact I abhor mindless violence. I also don't smoke. Okay, so I swear all the fucking time, but that's not the point here. Swearing and violence make sense in the context of the world where the game takes place. It's a dark place, where things aren't fair where bad things happen to good people all the time. And its protagonist is a man bent on revenge, who while on his quest for vengeance, not only becomes as bad as the people he's hunting, he arguably becomes worse.

So yes, I believe that the freedom given by an "R" rating is what is needed to bring Max Payne's dark world into the silver screen (clichés ahoy!) properly. It goes without saying that you can have a serious, violent, story with even the most vibrant pastel colors, but in the case of the Max Payne movie, it's also about staying true to its roots.


An example that comes to mind are the two Alien Versus Predator movies. While I'm far from being a fan of either one, the first movie went for a PG-13 rating that was completely out of place for fans of both original franchises, which were both really damn violent. The result was an overwhelming disappointment for most people. The sequel, AVP: Requiem, went for an "R" rating, and while that alone didn't make it a better movie, it definitely made it feel more true to its sources.

I for one liked AVP:R more than its predecessor though, and a quite fun movie on its own rights, but others would disagree. Oh, well.


And, to go back to Max Payne, if nothing else, Hell. How can you have a film noir without anyone smoking? That's just not right.

All this bitching aside, the first trailer for this movie is looking really damn good. They've captured the style and atmosphere of the games, Wahlberg is looking good in his role, and the action scenes seem suspensful. If not for the rating thing, I'd be sold on this movie already. Here's the actual trailer itself, so you can make up your own minds:



TL;DR version:

While there's still time for Max Payne the movie to fuck up everything the game stood for, The Dark Knight premieres on Thursday, and that one has been rated awesome. Not to mention that we're getting the new X-Files movie the week after this, though I'm a bit worried about that one.