Max Payne, Minimal Fun

There’s a movie in my head.  I built it out of trailers for Max Payne.  It has powerful, scary villains, a tortured hero, and the eternal, supernatural struggle between good and evil.  It is laden with Norse mythology, and punctuated with intense set pieces that include guns and explosions and Valkyrie.

It could be awesome.  But the actual movie has none of those features.  You might think you saw them in the trailer.  Maybe you heard a quote about “The Devil building his army” and “Max Payne is looking for things God wants hidden.”  You probably saw images of winged Valkryie and fiery skies.  Those things are said, and the images do occur, but they don’t have the meaning you’d hope.  The quotes are just one guy’s ramblings, a guy who is entirely tangental to any part of the story.  The images?  Well, apparently they aren’t meant to be taken literally.

There was still some promise.  The apparent bad guy seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength and resistence.  Maybe Max Payne shot him six times.  Maybe not.  My friend leans over and says: “promise me this is going to get better.”  Sure, I assure her.  But then the wheels started falling off.  Max Payne is only tortured in the most cliched sense.  There isn’t so much one evil bad guy as several sort of bad people doing apparently random bad things.  Some of them are highly improbable.  The rules fail to be applied consistently.  We thought someone was invulnerable, but he dies from a single shot.  The Valkyrie show up at odd times, but seem to signify nothing.

The central theme?  Nothing supernatural, or gripping, or high-tech.  It’s a concept that’s been used in a hundred lower-budget movies: somebody’s experimenting with something to make soldiers more soldiery.  Naturally, something goes wrong.  But this particular experiment is even dumber than most.  Instead of making soldiers stronger, smarter, or able to take punishment, it just makes them “feel” invulnerable.  And it only works on like 1%.  Don’t we have drugs like that?  Crack?  Cocaine?  Meth?  Even alcohol has been known to make idiots braver.  And more idiotic.  This version doesn’t seem much better, except for being blue.

I thought I had lowered my expectations.  But I guess I really had something I was looking for out of this movie.  Given the trailers, I think my hopes were somewhat justified.  But like Epic movie, where the jokes were actually funnier in the trailer than in the context of the movie, the scenes from Max Payne were better without the context of the movie.