I went to see Max Payne this weekend. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe marketing worked well on me because I never played the game, and really wasn’t even sure it was a game before somebody told me. But the imagery was cool and I’m a sucker for good cinematography, so why not.
Ultimately the film was just that; good imagery. The story had the potential of being interesting, but sort of stopped short of there. After a long talk with a friend who was familiar with the game, I realized that some of the omissions seemed to be because the filmmakers were a bit too familiar with the game. In doing adaptations, that’s always a problem. Usually, when you adapt a book, you are simply forced to cut things out because there’s too much. You hear of Harry Potter fans crying that the movies don’t match the book, but they are too dense to realize that a film of the actual book would A) be 5 hours long, B) Cost $400 million, and C) be boring as hell. Worse yet is adapting a game or an anime project. If you’re too close to that original material, you often take for granted that the audience will figure out things that you already know. But what they forget is that there’s no way to know all that an avid fan would know without a heavy background in the material.
(Warning: Spoiler Alert. If you intend to see Max Payne and haven’t, and would be upset with me for saying anything, stop reading.)
Ok, so the cool image that got me into that damn theater seat was a shot of a guy running toward a window from the side. The camera tracks with him from inside to outside the building. Another guy is standing at the open window, and from the inside it seems that he’s falling backward out the window. But as the camera reveals the outside view, you see a giant winged demon pulling him out of the window. VERY cool shot. So I see this and I say, “that could rock,” and I fork over my $18.
The premise of the story (other than the guy Max Payne is an ex homicide detective that could never solve his own wife’s murder), is that a large pharmaceutical company has made a drug that was supposed to turn soldiers into fearless, invincible soldiers, largely because it makes them feel ultimately strong and perfectly calm in battle. It’s also harder to kill this person because they feel less pain. So, it makes sense, but when they try it in tests, it ends up making less than 1% feel invincible, and the rest just freak out.
So all that makes sense, but there were holes. First off, the company shuts down the program, but then secretly sells the stuff on the street as a drug. But all you see is people freaking out when they take it. I’d imagine it wouldn’t make an attractive street drug if all you did was panic all the time! They never showed that it make people feel good or anything. So I never got the reason why it was a hot drug.
Second, what the drug would make you see is, for lack of a better description, Valkyries. Essentially, if you had a bad trip, you’d see these winged creatures chase you down and eventually kill you. If you were part of that “less than 1%”, you’d see them, but they wouldn’t be scary.
Eventually in the story, some guy explains that Valkyries are from Norse legend and that they are like big supporters of the warrior spirit. Ok. Sounds good. Makes some sense…
Now here’s my problem with that. In the end, that whole Valkyrie thing turned out to just be a hallucination. Other than an excuse for some very cool imagery, it didn’t go anywhere. Our main character ends up taking the drug too, and sees the Valkyries, and I suppose fits into that less than 1% because they don’t kill him. But does he draw power from them? No. Do they assist him? No. Does his ability to see them help him in any way? No. So apparently, the drug is simply a bad trip.
It would have cost them one more line of dialogue to suggest that the “less than 1%” can actually call on the power of the Valkyrie to fight battles, giving them access to this supernatural power that nobody else had. Talk about invincible! At the same time, the other 99% who take the drug fail the “test of the Valkyrie” and will be killed. Maybe they don’t know that that is their fate because though the drug doesn’t actually make them invincible, they might feel invincible (thus giving reason for the street market for the drug), but because they aren’t part of the chosen few, they will eventually die. In the end, when our hero takes the drug to survive, we could show now that he is this amazing, archetype, invincible for some reason, and connected to this alternate supernatural world of Valkyries. Now THAT would have been a story I could follow.
It’s sad when I see writers or directors missing these little moments that would take their film from ok to great. They had something potentially very deep and cool, but now only have a popcorn movie. Sure it’ll make money, but if I were the filmmaker would I be really proud of the film? Not really. Not when you had a chance to make a film that said something.
Oh well. They got me in the seat. Who am I to bitch?