Max Payne

 The Max Payne games are known for properly introducing bullet time into gaming (only a couple of years after The Matrix). They also had cheesy stories told through crappy comic book-like interludes and an all-pervading, wonderfully campy noir-style narration. Its inspirations are blatant and cinematic, and the movie basically pitches itself: lots of John-Woo-style action and a simple, pulpy plot delivered with over-the top noir affectation.

 And to be fair, Max Payne: The Motion Picture does deliver, for five minutes or so. The first scene features Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) sinking into the frozen depths while delivering a monologue about how the bottom is lined with corpses and they're reaching out to him and he'll soon be one of them and blah blah blah.

 It's fun! It even looks kind of good, in that Hollywood-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool kind of way. And then the scene is over, the title card comes up, and the voiceover is mostly abandoned for the rest of the movie.

 The script (by Beau Thorne) strings together scenes that seem to be written by a fourteen-year-old with next to no connective tissue - logic leaps and weird segues abound. I'm not going to talk about plot holes, because there's more hole than plot here. Characters appear and disappear and serve no clear function, there's a surreal element that turns out to be some sort of shared hallucination... it's an absolute clusterfuck.

 Max Payne (by the way, I'm really struggling not to type that in all-caps every time!) is a punisher-like figure who's lost his wife and baby son to a home invasion. He's the type of cop everyone seems to hate, because... well, it's no mystery - he's a completely unlikeable dick: all of Wahlberg's intensity, none of his charm. His only friend is an old partner of his dad's called B.B. (Beau Bridges), who's now working security for the same big pharma company his wife was working for when she died. Hmmmm.

 Max Payne starts off assigned to the cold cases desk, a plot point that has absolutely no purpose or payoff. Off-hours, he spends his time busting the balls of people in the underworld trying to find out more about his family's murder. Through a series of unrelated and highly contrived events he ends up discovering an extremely stupid and very poorly conceived conspiracy in which a designer drug caused a bunch of soldiers to go nuts... or something. Seriously, the plot seems to have been put together by locking a bunch of idiots in a room for a couple of hours along with a printout of the Wikipedia page with the plot synopsis for the first Max Payne game and a mountain of cocaine.

 This could all be redeemed if the movie had good action, but Director John Moore has no eye for it either. The action is choppy, poorly staged, and often... boring. It only nods to the game's famous bullet-time gimmick a couple of times, one of them consisting of Max Payne literally bending over backwards with a shotgun while a guy shoots at him and misses by quite a few meters, hitting some stuff in the foreground. And it goes on and on and on. It looks like ass, and conceptually, it's one of those scenes where you can't help but wonder what the fuck everyone involved was thinking.

 The other bullet time sequence is of Max Payne shooting an unarmed man. Seriously, what the fuck.

 The practical effects team did a good job, though. I often bemoan the lack of squibs and bullet impact detonations in modern cinema, but here in MaxPayneland the art is alive and healthy. It gets a workout in an early, very ridiculous scene where Max Payne blows open all the stalls in a public restroom with a hand cannon, but their main showpiece is when a private army shoots up a whole office building floor; As action, it's shit: Max Payne's main move there is to bravely run away, and the soldier's aim is sub-stormtrooper - but there are a ton of squibs detonating all over the place, glass breaking, etcetera. It's like they got the background for a John Woo sequence just right, they just forgot to include anything interesting going on.
 Another point in favour: It does have some nice atmosphere, despite the plot's best attempts to piss it away; Credit the director with some of that, and cinematographer John Sela (David Leitch's go to guy, most recently seen in The Fall Guy). It doesn't go far enough to develop into a proper sense of style, but the wintry palette and the constant, chunky snowfall does look pretty good.
 Other stylistic flourishes don't fare as well. There's a fade to red effect to underline some violence that is laughably bad (and again, just on one scene and then forgotten), and the whole angel hallucinations are, with a single mildly cool exception, a non-starter.

 I have to say I like the idea of extracting a proper neo-noir out of the game's shooter fantasyland... but that intention means nothing when the execution is this poor. The movie is so disjointed it reeks of studio meddling, but the director's on record defending it as a good film.

 Well, at least it doesn't, like the games, have interminable scenes of Max Payne walking on razor-thin blood lines. Those were the worst.

 And shit, I guess this means I now need to catch up with Tim Olyphant's Hitman movie, too.