“I don’t believe in heaven. I believe in pain. I believe in fear. I believe in death.”

Justin’s rating: More wooden acting than The Happening

Justin’s review: When it came out in 2001, Max Payne was quite the thrill ride of a PC game. It wrapped Hard Boiled-inspired gun-fu inside of a gritty, over-the-top noir story about drugs, cops, a hard winter storm, and revenge with dual pistols. Even the name was over the top. It was stupid fun to activate slow-mo and jump sideways with both guns blazing — a true cinematic experience.

So for a game that borrowed heavily from John Woo’s films to then be adapted into a movie itself felt like we came around to the most pointless but delightful full circle. It’s just a shame that they didn’t hire Woo to direct (instead, we got the guy who made the worst Die Hard film, bar none).

Obsessed with finding his wife and daughter’s murderer, Detective Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) gets a possible lead at last. But it comes at a bad time, as he gets framed for a murder and has to try to bust through a conspiracy and drug ring while the city’s cops try to track him down.

Along the way, he makes best friends forever with a Russian assassin named Mona Sax (Mila Kunis), who’s also got a beef with these drug dealers. Chris O’Donnell shows up to remind us that he exists. Oh, and there might be angels or demons or something hovering around.

Style and atmosphere is sadly all that Max Payne has going for it. It weirdly jettisons most of the iconic elements of the game — the narration, the bullet time sequences — for a slick-looking but emotionally hollow journey. A big part of that is that Max’s motivation for his obsessive hunt isn’t fully shown until far too late in the film, keeping the audience from really caring about his journey.

And Max himself is so tonally neutral that I’d rather be following anyone else around but him. Even if you’ve never played the game to know how unlike his inspiration he is, you’ll feel it from, well, every noir cop movie you’ve ever seen.

Done well, this would’ve been a high-octane Sin City or a John Wick-style romp. But Max Payne is done extremely forgettably. It takes too long to ramp up into revenge spree firefights when we should’ve been hip-deep in bullet casings by minute 12. I guess that gives us the opportunity to really take in all of the creases on Mark Wahlberg’s eternally furrowed brow. He furrows the crap out of that thing. Probably thinking about what car he’s going to buy with this low-effort display of acting.

A movie like this shouldn’t play it safe. It does itself no favors whatsoever from holding back. It should’ve been wall-to-wall gunfire, growly inner monologues, gonzo beats, memorable one-liners, bullets tossing people a half-mile in every direction, blood squibs erupting like volcanoes, and oh-so-satisfying revenge fantasies.

Instead, it’s a middle-of-the-road PG-13 risk-adverse exercise in studio cowardice. I assure you, the second I put the period at the end of this sentence, I’ll be done thinking about this movie for the rest of my life.

Intermission!

• “There’s an army of bodies under this river.”
• This movie loves its extreme angles
• “C’mon. Come get his watch.”
• Shooting toilet stalls open is the cool way to do it
• The guy who voiced Max Payne in the games is an FBI agent here
• If you’re in a dark place and a light is going on and off, probably a lot of bad stuff’s going to happen
• Cops don’t like it when you barge into a dead officer’s office and start ransacking the place
• Tattoo guy looks so eager to give a lecture on viking mythology