I watched (rented) Max Payne on Prime Video just to refresh my memory a bit, and it's as bad as I remember. An adaptation of a game with all that shooting takes until the last 20 minutes to finally have a couple brief shootouts? And yeah, it deviated from the game's story (why? You're essentially given a movie in game form made INTO a movie), but it was a mess ignoring this. Holy cow, there was so much unbelievable sh!t I don't even know where to begin, and not just because of the supernatural hallucinogenic drug that makes people see f*cking winged demons, either. The characters are bland and not interesting with a plot that drags. Nevermind the lack of narrations, bullet time (except for one scene where he outshoots a guy standing upright while falling backwards with a shotgun), or one-liners from the game, the movie was awful ignoring this.
I know games-to-movies haven't had the best track record for obvious reasons, but this is one of the easier properties to get right on the big screen given the film noir style of the games, the gritty atmosphere and the fact that it's framing device is from f*cking comic book pages, but they completely botched it with a poorly-paced, edited and written film that doesn't match the atmosphere it was setting up at all. It was so dull, boring and shallow that even Marky Mark is bland in this (congrats on having 2 phoned-in performances in a row, never thought I'd see that from you).
Hell, even the dead family scene was completely dumbed down, perhaps the biggest cardinal sin of all in this movie. It was done so much better in the game, I felt like I could actually feel Max's pain (no pun intended) when he mourns over his dead wife and baby, which brings me to my next point (and this is a real pet peeve of mine)...
It's another movie that clearly should've been R and was dumbed down by Tom Rothman's Fox. A cop who comes home and finds his wife and baby murdered, then brutally guns down gangsters with drugs and prostitutes thrown in for good measure, and they saw fit to give us a watered-down version of
that. You can tell it was truncated by missing the darker story elements from the game (which was made for adults, anyway). Yeah, there's an "unrated" cut filled with cheap CGI blood effects, but it was pretty much already shot for PG-13, anyway. You can even tell it's
choppily edited to add those in
after the fact (Taken, this is not).
