Max Payne [Mark Wahlberg] is a detective who had his family murdered almost right before his eyes. He now works in the cold case department and chases any leads he can find. After checking up on an old snitch of his looking for more leads on his wife’s murder he finds more than he wanted to and gets dragged into a drug addicted serial murder case. Payne runs this down, while getting closer to his wife’s killer.

Let me start out by saying if you haven’t read my Top 5 of the week, I invite you check it out and instead of having Mortal Kombat as number 5 please just put this one there. This movie is like Meet Dave for me, it comes along at the perfect time to make me realize how it can always get worse. A couple weeks ago when I saw Righteous Kill I thought it was going to be the worst movie of the fall season, and then here comes along Max Payne fighting neck and neck for the title. I was happy that I did not go to this show alone, because if I did I think I would finally walk out of a movie before it finished. The movie has amazing casting and still manages to suck so much, Beau Bridges, Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg. The film was directed by John Moore – also did ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ and ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ which I both enjoyed on some level – and he should try to hide in a cave somewhere in a nearby desert because he is now my director to hate on.

The movie is based on the video game that was released in 2001, and if you ask any gamer why he liked it he will not answer the question with one of these: ‘the awesome story’; ‘the great visuals’; ‘the amazing acting’. This game was awesome because you were given lots of bullets and were put into a room full of bad guys and you could shoot all over the place in with some bullet-time style action. This movie took from forty to fifty minutes to get to an action scene. You had to endure some horrible acting from Mark Wahlberg, Ludacris, and Beau Bridges with some awful line delivery. Now don’t get me wrong I wasn’t stupid enough to thinking that this movie would be good at all, but I thought it would be a bad movie where after as much as fifteen minutes of chatter I would get some really cool action scenes and that would’ve been enough to make me pass the film. When you watch the trailer for this you may notice some pretty looking gun shooting going, that all sucks. Even at the end of the movie when they show us the bullet-time style shooting it doesn’t help at all.

I’m at this moment writing off Wahlberg until a good director comes along and slaps him across the face like Scorsese did for The Departed. Luckily next year he has two films I’m looking forward to already, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fighter and The Brazilian Job [the sequel to The Italian Job]. So he has two opportunities to redeem himself.

This movie should not be watched. If you see it on cable please switch the channel, this movie is sad and apparently there is something after the credits of the film which I doubt anyone will see since you probably won’t stick around that long. The only thing I could say to myself when I left the cinema with my friends was “I should’ve gone to ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’”. Please don’t see this movie, and join me in sending a letter to Mark Wahlberg and tell him that he was wrong.

IMDB says 7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes 17%

I say 2.0/10