Hero is no new Bourne in Max Payne

10 April 2012

If you can follow the plotlines of this swingeing approximation of the well-known video game of the same name, you are a better customer for John Moore’s spectacular thriller than I was.

Payne, played by Mark Wahlberg, who ever since his Oscar nomination for The Departed seems to have departed as a star prospect, is a maverick cop determined to track down those responsible for the brutal murders of his wife and child. He is a little like Matt Damon in the Bourne films, determined on justice even though everyone around is likely to betray him.

The journey he takes into an increasingly dark and phantom-infested underworld leads him to suspect everyone and everything. And it leads director Moore into a plethora of expensive special effects as New York’s weather, either pouring or snowy, closes in around him.

All this is certainly spectacular, and Jonathan Sela’s cinematography does grim justice to this game of strange happenings in almost Dickensian surroundings. Which is perhaps, together with the success of the video game, why the film has risen to the number one spot at the US box office.

I can’t think it will stay there long. The plot is almost incomprehensible, so subsidiary players like Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris O’Donnell and Olga Kurylenko are drowned in the detail and swallowed up in the computer-generated tropes.

As for Wahlberg, he works hard but seems less likely than Matt Damon to gain a new reputation as a Hollywood A-lister. Nor is the movie likely to give anything like the lasting pleasure of that series.

Max Payne
Cert: 15

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