Max Payne; or how Uwe Boll destroyed any chance of a video game movie living up to its potential.

You might be thinking “Wait a minute, Uwe Boll didn’t direct this movie, it was directed by John Moore! The same guy that directed Owen Wilson’s nose in Behind Enemy Lines! Poor guy… Owen really went off the deep end after Wedding Crashers.” However, Uwe Boll lowered the bar so unbelievably low for video game movies after House of the Dead, BloodRayne, BloodRayne 2 (Direct-to-DVD), Alone in the Dark, Dungeon Siege, Postal, and Seed ( the last one wasn’t actually a video game movie, but it sucked ass) that I grade them on a 70 point curve. And as such, Max Payne gets a pat on the head, much like a young child handing you a macaroni and glitter painting. It ends up looking like complete shit, but you don’t really have the heart to tell them. Alas, you have to give them credit where credit is due.

 

Mark “Good Vibrations” Wahlberg is always a badass. The hot Ukrainian chick with the unpronounceable last name from the Hitman movie and the upcoming James Bond flick had her clothes off within the first fifteen minutes. Meg Griffin Mila Kunis cleans up pretty well. Ludacris didn’t make an ass of himself (although you could tell he was trying really, really hard not to). And the effects crew didn’t end up turning the whole thing into a early 2000′s bullet-time frag-fest you would have expected (don’t worry though, it’s still in there, I promise. You just have to wait a while for it). You might be asking “Well, what about the relentless assault of video game adaptations from the 90′s such as Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros, and Street Fighter?” But deep down inside you know you loved every single one of them. Lets be honest; Short of CGI, you couldn’t come up with a better casting choice for King Koopa than Dennis Hopper (Although Dolph Lundgren would have done a far better job than John-Claude Van Damme as Guile.)

 

Watch the Max Payne trailer here: