An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: John Moore.
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges, Donal Logue, Chris O'Donnell, Billy Boyd
Description: A devoted family man, police officer Max Payne returns home to his wife Michelle and baby daughter, finding both slain by an intruder who flees the scene. Unable to rest until he finds the killer, Max scours every case file, looking for any investigations with similar characteristics to Michelle's slaying. A tip-off from a snitch leads to a nightclub where Max meets Natasha Sax and her sister Mona. The former accompanies Max home but he rebuffs her crude advances, shortly before she is slain too in an alleyway. His wallet is discovered at the scene. Convinced that Max killed her sister, Natasha swears revenge.
Country: US. 2008. 99mins
If you can follow the plotlines of this swingeing approximation of the well-known video game of the same name, you are a better customer for John Moore’s spectacular thriller than I was.
Payne, played by Mark Wahlberg, who ever since his Oscar nomination for The Departed seems to have departed as a star prospect, is a maverick cop determined to track down those responsible for the brutal murders of his wife and child. He is a little like Matt Damon in the Bourne films, determined on justice even though everyone around is likely to betray him.
The journey he takes into an increasingly dark and phantom-infested underworld leads him to suspect everyone and everything. And it leads director Moore into a plethora of expensive special effects as New York’s weather, either pouring or snowy, closes in around him.
All this is certainly spectacular, and Jonathan Sela’s cinematography does grim justice to this game of strange happenings in almost Dickensian surroundings. Which is perhaps, together with the success of the video game, why the film has risen to the number one spot at the US box office.
I can’t think it will stay there long. The plot is almost incomprehensible, so subsidiary players like Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Chris O’Donnell and Olga Kurylenko are drowned in the detail and swallowed up in the computer-generated tropes.
As for Wahlberg, he works hard but seems less likely than Matt Damon to gain a new reputation as a Hollywood A-lister. Nor is the movie likely to give anything like the lasting pleasure of that series.
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I find it strange that so many people insist on pulling this film down, not for its failings, but for their own.
Max Payne looks like Bourne? Well, he also looks like Max Payne. Who came first, by the way. Also, the plot is too difficult for you to follow? The plot is simplified from the computer game and that was played and understood by children.
If the film is guilty of anything, it is poor direction and balance. Marvelous set pieces from the game have been left out for space and time, but those that made it have not been expanded to fit the new, simplified story.
There is a vacuum left in the feel of the film, like listening to half a conversation on a phoneline. Something else is going on, but Moore's film chooses not to mention it, but you can feel it there.
I recommend anyone who hasn't played the games to go out and get them second hand, and enjoy a taught, well told story, and then enjoy the film by watching it understanding that it couldn't be all the game could be, so it did what it could. Not a great film by any means but totally undesearving of the harsh criticism it has recieved simply due to its origins.
- Billy Bang, Darlington England
I saw the trailer for this last week and even the trailer reeked. Max Payne is an absurd name for a film or a character in a film - like Homer's nom de jour 'Max Power' he's the man whose name you'd love to touch...etc. Daft name aside - and its probably not a problem in America where the phone book probably contains dozens of Max Paynes - it certainly looked fast, flashy and atmospheric just like a computer game should but is it a good career move to play a computer game character - it's not far from dressing up as Mr Wimpy and standing outside a burger restaurant with a billboard. Mark Wahlburg looks so much like Matt Damon's Bourne it's embarrassing - his next role will probably be as Damon's stunt double at this rate. It would be more difficult to go to the chemists and ask for a pack of extra small condoms than to ask the box office for a ticket to see 'Max Payne'.
- Squiz, Islington
Morning:
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