“The film is not about Minimum Payne, and it’s not Medium Payne," says director John Moore. "It’s Max Payne."
Mark Wahlberg is Max Payne, a grieving cop demoted to filing clerk in the dusty bowels of a Manhattan police house after the murder of his wife and child.
With the official probe into the atrocity drawing a blank, it’s left to a taciturn angry-man-in-a-black-leather-jacket to carry out his own investigation. In his own way.
Gate-crashing a party thrown by a snitch, he runs into Olga Kurylenko’s Russian femme fatale, a rather slovenly young hottie who drops her clobber before Max has had a chance to get his Yale into the lock. No, don’t titter.
So, she’s a bit miffed when he gives her the elbow. But not half as miffed as when she gets torn to pieces in an icy back alley by a shadowy flock of winged fiends. Payne's foes don't just exist on this side of the supernatural spectrum.
Essentially a video game on the big screen, Max Payne often looks striking - the flame-kissed vision of hell is particularly impressive - and it looks at home on those TV screens that once hosted its videogame predecessor.
