Just when you thought that Mark Wahlberg was on his way to becoming a major player in Hollywood after his Oscar-nominated role in The Departed,"" he takes a career-damaging step downward in ""Max Payne,"" a deafeningly noisy, structurally messy, aggressively violent adaptation of the popular video game.
The best element of ""Max Payne"" is its brief running time, though it's quite excruciating to watch what unfolds on screen unless you enjoy poorly-staged mayhem and quasi-stylish, mostly derivative production.
The other positive is a sort of preview of the new Bond girl, the beautiful Russian actress Olga Kurylenko as the alluring femme fatale Natasha, soon to be seen in ""Quantum of Solace"" opposite Daniel Craig.
Essentially, ""Max Payne"" is a simple, conventional and even primitive revenge saga. Wahlberg plays the title role, a man who still suffers the pain of losing his beloved wife and baby girl. Committed to (actually obsessed with) vengeance, he goes on a mission to ""restore justice.""
In the background of the plot there's an incoherent conspiracy saga dominated by assassins who seem to be the target not only of the police force, but of a greedy corporation. The tale resorts to a bunch of clichés, prime among them being the notion of a nasty, ruthless big business, portrayed in the form of a drug company, an evil empire that is exploiting its discovery of a particular drug with selective, if also detrimental effects.
The film wastes several good actors in supporting roles. Beau Bridges plays B.B. Hensley - the former cop who's now head of security and friends with Max - and Chris O'Donnell, who has not made a major movie for awhile, is miscast as a top executive at the drug company.
The filmmakers have gone out of their way to extend a video game to the length of a feature, but of the 99 minutes, more than half are dull and the rest are just an imitation of second-rate ideas, courtesy of amateur scribe Beau Thorne. The dialogue ""written"" by Thorne is mostly banal and kept to minimum, so that very young Americans and overseas audiences will be able to comprehend the plot just by watching the action.
Part of the problem in adapting the video game to the big screen derives from the specific nature of the game, which relies heavily on pre-scripted commands for the different levels of play.
Unfortunately, the tone of ""Max Payne,"" which is dramatically uninviting from first frame to last, changes from scene to scene, and what you are left with is a series of serviceable set pieces that are visually compelling in the most visceral and superficial way.
Indeed the torrential rain and snowfall, is impressive, but then comes the realization that the overuse of these effects is just a gimmick to distract attention from the big hole that occupies the center of the yarn.
Sequel alarm: The post-credits scene frightfully suggests that there would be another chapter of the saga.
Grade: D
