John Moore | 103 mins | Blu-ray | 15
I was a bit of a gamer once. Not an especially hardcore one, but certainly a gamer. And I remember Max Payne, and I remember enjoying it, and I remember thinking it would make quite a good film, and I remember one of the biggest problems being that what made it so unique as a game was the bullet-time feature and what would make it so derivative as a film would be to use bullet-time. But it also had lots of other things going for it: the snow-bound nighttime New York setting, the dark revenge plot, the hard-boiled gravel-toned voiceover.
Luckily, director John Moore doesn’t use Matrix-derived bullet-time visuals, but, despite keeping a snow-bound New York and a revenge plot, he’s somehow managed to also throw out everything that made Max Payne: The Game good. Despite the similarities in plot and setting, this doesn’t feel at all like the game.
Max Payne: The Film, to put it simply, is a load of crap.
I’ll just reel off the bad points:
For something advertised as an action movie — at best, an action-thriller — there’s barely any action. Even the climax, where you might expect a fair bit, is virtually devoid of it. Moore exploits extreme slow motion to stand in for the game’s Matrix-esque combat. 
Unfortunately, he seems to be under the illusion that a couple of barely-moving slow-mo moments also stand in for a full action sequence. When an action movie can’t deliver any action, there’s a problem.
Instead, the budget seems to have been spent on some angel/demon CGI rubbish. Early on, one begins to wonder if the film’s headed toward Constantine-esque fantasy territory — it’s not in the game, but hey, that’s never bothered Uwe Boll. Eventually it becomes clear it isn’t, these are just some kind of junkie visions. At least, I’m sure they’re meant to be, but I’m not sure the film ever makes that explicit — I wouldn’t blame a casual viewer going away with the sense that these angel/demon/things are actually meant to be there and only the junkies can see them. Which would be just as irrelevant.
Despite this being the “Harder Cut”, it comes across as a PG-13 film playing at being an R. (Though the extended cut was released as ‘unrated’ in the US, the original MPAA rating was an R before a handful of changes needed to get it down to the more bankable PG-13.) It’s now around three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but from what I can gather a significant chunk of that seems to be made up of people walking around longer. 
The ‘harder’ bit merely comes from a couple of frames (literally) of violence and the odd bit of CG blood. Presumably the extra walking around is to artificially lengthen the running time and persuade the more gullible that they’re getting a tougher experience.
Mark Wahlberg has all the charisma and emotion of a wooden plank. No one else in the cast can offer anything better, least of all a miscast Mila Kunis. In fairness, it’s not like any of them are given proper characters to work with: most display no kind of arc, and even those that have one — Kunis, for example — are ultimately ignored, the events that might affect them on an emotional level serving only to further what stands in for a plot. Only Max himself is allowed any genuine emotional connection. And by “genuine” I mean some supporting characters we never see again tell us it’s had a real impact on him. Wahlberg certainly doesn’t convey it.
Olga Kurylenko is also in this film. She tries to sleep with the hero and fails, as per usual.
At least some of it looks quite nice. The drifting snow-laden exterior shots are among the few bits of the film that might genuinely be considered good. But when you can get pretty images elsewhere, why suffer through this?
A short post-credits scene suggests a sequel. Why is this buried after the credits? Presumably so as the filmmakers didn’t embarrass themselves more widely by implying they thought this pathetic effort might earn itself a follow-up.
Uwe Boll wanted to get his hands on Max Payne. At times while watching this, I wished he had. You can’t get much more damning than that. Other than, maybe, something witty, like — “maximum pain is certainly what this film will cause you”.
Max Payne featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2010, which can be read in full here.
In the special features on The International’s Blu-ray, director Tom Tykwer comments that architecture is a focus of his when making a film. It certainly shows here: there are many, many lingering shots of buildings (and just about everything else, actually), all very modern, with straight, clean, crisp lines. The cinematography matches it in pin-sharp perfection, which at least means the Blu-ray image is a pleasure to watch. The film itself, however, is a little dull.
Not that her continued presence would’ve improved the film’s final act. The ultimate resolution is half brave and half cop-out: the goodies fail in bringing the baddies down, the film explicit in the fact that such business will always continue; and yet most of the baddies are dispatched, one way or another, and a closing array of newspaper headlines serves to imply that the law got the Big Bad Bank after all. As “have your cake and eat it” endings go, it’s a damp squib.
The filmmaking skill Tykwer exhibits during this one action sequence, plus the beauty with which he shoots international scenery, suggests he’s the perfect director to take over the Bourne franchise (should that rumble on). He already seems to be borrowing from it, including the choice to underscore all his long, slow shots with punchy, driving music, as if this in itself will give the film some dynamism. It doesn’t. Though The International may occasionally remind you of that trilogy, then, it doesn’t come close in the entertainment stakes.
So many consumers hold off for the DVD these days, especially with the added quality offered by Blu-ray, that the old answer of “what was released in the cinema” doesn’t necessarily hold true any more. Filmmakers know some will be waiting for the DVD, so are less concerned with releasing a studio-mandated, shorter, mass audience friendly cut into cinemas when their fuller vision can be found on DVD. Equally, the PR people know that “longer cut!” and “not seen in cinemas!” and other such slogans can help sell DVDs, and so may be forcing needless and unwelcome extensions onto filmmakers. Then there’s all those older directors who think they’re doing a good thing finally getting to tamper with their film 30 years on, who may well be misguided.
There remains one argument for clarity, I think. How does one guarantee that, in the future, the ‘correct’ version remains accessible? With new formats always coming along, there’s no assurance that every cut of a film will be released; with TV showings, there’s no assurance the preferred version will always be the one shown (though there’s another argument for how much the latter matters considering they already mess around with aspect ratios and edits for violence/swearing/sex/etc.) But then, even if a filmmaker makes it clear that their preferred version is the one that only came out on DVD/Blu-ray, what chance is there that unscrupulous disc / download / unknown-future-format producers or TV schedulers won’t just revert to the theatrical version by default?
Pale Rider is, in many ways, a pretty stock Western. The plot is likely to be familiar even to those who haven’t seen a great deal of the genre: remote community, where some controlling business-type is making life hard for a bunch of everyday poor grafters; in rides a mysterious stranger, who sees the injustice of the situation; when peaceful methods don’t work, there’s the climactic shoot-out; and the mysterious stranger finally rides into the sunset/from whence he came/forever on.
but the person he has in mind is dead… and yet, when they come face to face, the marshall repeatedly utters, “it is you”.
the only particularly memorable role is Sydney Penny’s naïve young teenager, Megan. Her shifting emotions and variable actions are perhaps the only parts of the story one can’t necessarily see coming from the off.
Readers may remember that I opened my 
Mac and Kutcher play the roles they always play— No, actually, in fairness, I can’t say that: I think I’ve only seen Mac in the 
It’s as recognisable from TV sitcoms — 
It’s generally taken as a rule that an original film is better than the remake, particularly so if that original is in a language other than English and the remake is American. But there’ll always be something to buck the trend, and in my view that’s Insomnia.
surprised how little his lack of sleep had to do with anything. Here, there are several scenes of Skarsgard struggling to sleep, he’s visibly rougher as the film progresses, and it seems to impact his judgement and sense of what’s going on more than in Nolan’s film. If the other character elements are apparently less developed, this is something the original does better.
Although Disney have recently treated (I use the word loosely) us to a glut of films based on theme park attractions, movies adapted from good old board games seem a lot rarer. This is probably for good reason — even more so than Disney rides, the majority have no kind of useable narrative. Cluedo (aka Clue in the US) is one of the few that does, and consequently is one of the few (only?) board games that has reached the silver screen. So far, anyway.
Other than the board game connection, Clue is best known for its three different endings, all of which were released, with each screening having just one attached. On TV the film shows with all three consecutively, and they perhaps work best this way — there’s a rising scale of ridiculousness, and the varied repetition of a couple of gags underlines rather than steals their amusement value. My personal favourite variant was the first, incidentally.
#58 
In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a white girl falls in love with a black man and brings him home to meet the parents. You can almost imagine this premise still being launched today, as one of those dreadful ‘comedies’ Hollywood pumps out every year, in which the parents are outrageous racists — played by some ageing stars who should really know better — and one of the young couple is a bit accident-prone and played by someone like Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler.
It could easily have been a simplistic message movie — these people are liberal, these people are racist, etc — but instead there’s complexity at every turn. There’s the liberal white parents who never expected to find themselves in this situation, and suddenly are struggling with their own ideologies; or the black characters, who you might think would be eager to move ‘up in the world’ but actually react even worse to the idea; or the Catholic priest being one of the few characters unwaveringly in favour of the union. And even then, these characters could just become ciphers for the arguments and debates; but they’re not, they’re characters, having believable reactions, and from this comes the debate.
Final Destination is a full decade old this year, which somehow seems too long — it can’t be so old, surely? On the other hand, it fits quite comfortably into that run of teen-centric horror films from the the mid- to late-’90s, like 
The most important part, all things considered, are the ways Death settles the score. No mysterious “natural causes” demises here — Final Destination is all about inventive executions. Even after a decade, in which some of the Great Big Shocks have been revealed in various Top 10s and “OMG do you remember the bit where…” conversations, some bits remain impressive and/or amusing. And it certainly has fun with a few of them, teasing the viewer with various means of dispatching the victim before they ultimately succumb to one. Or, alternatively, just surprising us with a sudden whack. Both are good. Only one bit — a fidgety-armed corpse — is a thoroughly gratuitous jump-scare.
but that one solitary shot confirms it must be some kind of entity with a very specific motive. And that’s a shame, because it’s not developed further — i.e. no Big Reveal of the nasty Death-thing — and would’ve been more interesting to play with that ambiguity — is Alex right that it’s all planned, or is it just a series of nasty coincidences?
100Films.co.uk 