Bad Screenwriting, Exhibit A: Max Payne
Posted on | February 17, 2009 | No Comments
Almost all of my beloved screenplays are adaptations of some sort.
My favorite action movie is Terminator 2, which is a sequel to the 1984 movie. My favorite martial arts movie is Drunken Master 2, which is a sequel as well but also pulls elements from the biography of real-life folk hero Wong Fei Hung. And my favorite movie of all time (L.A. Confidential) was written by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland and based on a novel by James Ellroy.
So, I obviously think that adaptations can be fantastic. Unfortunately, May Payne is not one of those. I recently watched this on DVD and was truly disappointed in how poorly it was translated from what was only an above-average video game into a subpar motion picture.
I mildly enjoyed playing the video game back when it came out in 2001 and was hoping for big things for this movie because I’m a fan of both Mark Wahlberg (who plays the title character) and Mila Kunis. Sadly, the script by Beau Thorne and the direction by John Moore come across as obvious rip-offs of superior movies, a cinematic battle in which style brutalizes substance and logic must flee from predictability.
[SPOILER ALERT: Do not continue reading if you haven’t watched the movie and don’t want to know about the very obvious plot “twists”.]
Max Payne centers on the eponymous detective who’s trying to find out who killed his wife and baby. There’s a sorry stab at screenwriting complexity by throwing out red herrings regarding a drug called Valkyr and visions of valkyries and demons. Thorne and Moore attempt to create a character-driven neo film noir … but forget to bring the mystery, the suspense, or even three-dimensional characters. It’s no surprise than that in a film filled with corrupt or angst-ridden characters, the most caring person (BB Hensley played by Beau Bridges) is so obviously the main villain.
And how does Max survive being left for dead in a frozen river? Visions of his dead wife telling him to go back to the land of the living – one of the worst examples of a deus ex machina in recent cinematic history. There are loads more examples of such bad writing.
Plus, it’s a sad fact that a movie adapted from an amazingly violent game based solely on the pleasure of shooting as many thugs as possible ends up having virtually no gunplay in the entire first act. When the action finally arrives in the third act, it’s neither thrilling nor satisfying. The original game borrowed heavily from The Matrix and various John Woo movies, with its “bullet time” being very prominent in the game play. But here in the 2008 movie, the bullet time appears even more derivative and, for the most part, rather pointless and fake.
So my verdict on Max Payne? It was a maximum pain to watch.
Tags: Mark Wahlberg > Max Payne > Screenwriting > video games