Max Payne, Minimum Pleasure
Posted by Carachan on November 23, 2008 | Permalink
The expression says it all.
Yeah: I just saw it. I’m not going to pretend I was expecting it to be good, least of all because I saw the Metacritic scores before I watched it, but also because I know that videogame movies are doomed to failure. See: Doom.
I want to at least try and address why I think this true in this week’s post – because it should be easy right? Videogames and movies have so much in common, after all. These days, landmark videogames are cinematic in nature, are usually narrative based, and require a charismatic hero to lead you through the ride of your life.
Unfortunately, what movies and videogames don’t have in common these days is the amount of money they both make, and this is why Hollywood is investing in more and more videogame titles. The truth is that Hollywood is lagging behind the videogaming industry significantly in terms of initial sales. Spiderman 3, if not the biggest grossing movie of all time to date, grossed $59 million on opening day. Grand Theft Auto IV grossed $310 million on day one.
Don’t start calling me naïve though: Spiderman 3 took less time to make, was less expensive to make and has more opportunities for (crap) merchandising – but on the other hand less people are paying the gigantic fee for a cinema ticket these days, and are downloading movies illegally too. Let’s also not forget that movies are only a few hours of enjoyment – games are usually about twenty to thirty hours worth of interactive entertainment, sometimes with a storyline you can shape yourself (more replay value!). So the world just got harder for Hollywood, much harder than it’s been before.
So, Hollywood, what do you do for a cash injection? Cash in on the videogamer market. If you’re short a little money, why not rape a known brand for its fans? Instant result. And it totally works. But at the cost of aesthetics, of course.
I’m not someone who will cry about it all day, but I do quietly lament the lack of recognition of videogames as art. It might happen someday, but currently, there are people who play games simply to see how they might make a movie for their studio rather than recognising it as a piece of art in is own right. They pass over what good auteur directors might regard as the main reason for making a film: because the story is good. Instead, they go straight to the parts of the game that will translate into a movie: guns, explosions, and all that Michael Bay stuff.
Max Payne, the original videogame, was a good game because of the combination of things it managed to pull off. It was cinematic in nature because it simultaneously wanted to achieve the first bullet-time mechanism in a videogame, and a noir yarn was the perfect setting for this. Max Payne was a critical and commercial success not only because it had a great story, but because it had great style and a good mix of genres. Between chapters, a caustically narrated (and genuinely funny) comic book pushed the plot on, and during gameplay occasional moments of black humour provided a break from the tense atmosphere. Even in the inferior and overhyped Max Payne 2, Mona Sax was an interesting and complex character who despite the cliché femme fatale bit was curiously badass.
Max Payne, as a game, was charmingly Raymond Chandler whilst also bitter and gritty when it needed to be. It had momentum; from the beginning, you knew why you were there, you knew where you were going, and you knew it was going to be great fun getting there. Let’s also not forget Lords and Ladies.
TV you can really stop massacring for.
The film, on the other hand, might have been good if it had remembered that it needed that momentum and story. And perhaps an actor who could do more than two expressions (poor videogame Max Payne only needed one constipated look because you hardly ever saw his face). There was also a surprising lack of gun battles for what I was sure was a tale of revenge, rather than a slow, poorly told murder mystery through a blue filter. From the beginning, I felt like movie Max was a bit of a deaf mute rather than a man filled with rage; and there was no reason to identify with him. He just lacked a voice. Perhaps this is one of the great advantages of videogames: you instantly identify with your main character because you are him. Wahlberg had to do something a little more drastic than look slightly puppy-eyed to make me feel like I wasn’t bored out of my skull.
Come back, videogame Mona! All is forgiven.
The movie’s Mona Sax too was a non character, and didn’t even try to seduce or empathise with Max once (though the film ensured there was no reason to empathise with him in the first place). The serious lack of charm in the film made me feel like I was so alienated from the characters that I didn’t care if Valkyrie took over the world.
Then there came the ridiculous computer-generated angels. The game shied away from an emphasis on the supernatural, though there was always a fantastic atmosphere of tension and intrigue in every level. Max hallucinated several times in the game, but not to the extent that I felt like choking myself with laughter. Near the end of the movie, Wahlberg hears his dead baby crying in what is about a three second sound bite so hilariously cut off that I couldn’t help giggling. Then later, he gets ‘the rage’ and sees angels and fire and starts to yell, and I laughed uncontrollably. Let’s also not forget the lack of Lords and Ladies.
In conclusion, I guess we’ll see more of these turkeys until someone in Hollywood gets it right, because they certainly aren’t going to stop making them whilst their industry slowly dies and ours slowly grows. I hear there are two beloved animes of mine being sacrificed at the altar of Hollywood profit right now – two more movies I’ll cry my way through, because I’m just not strong enough to stay away… I’m such a weakling.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
A great read. I am convinced that Lords and Ladies has more entertainment value than the average real life TV show despite it only being a minute or so long.
I couldn’t bring myself to pay the £6+ to go see Max Payne in the cinema but I did attempt to watch a downloaded version. It took me about 20 minutes to lose all interest in Mark Wahlberg’s Max and I didn’t watch much further. A little dissapointing but, as with you, I’d never really attempted to convince myself that it would be good. So far I’m not finding it hard to pretend that that film never existed.
I like the theme of the blog. I dedicate this awesome quote to your cause…
“She liked me. I could feel that. The way you feel when the cards are falling right for you, with a nice little pile of blue and yellow chips in the middle of the table. Only what I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t playing her. She was playing me, with a deck of marked cards and the stakes weren’t any blue and yellow chips. They were dynamite.”