Max Payne is Painful to the Max

In the history of this blog, I’ve called a lot of movies “shitty.” Some of them might not have really deserved that. Some of them were probably “bad” or perhaps “average.” But if they pissed me off, I went for the “shitty” rating because they wasted my time. Max Payne made me re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about movie reviewing. Max Payne plumbs new depths in the world of shitty film-making. I wish I had a score lower than “shitty” because that is what Max Payne deserves.

Max Payne is a movie based on a video game based on film noir. In the game, detective Max Payne investigates the murder of his wife and child, and in doing so, gets involved in innumerable gun fights. It’s an action game, so it’s to be expected. One of the things that separated Max Payne from other games of the time was that it incorporated slow-motion “bullet-time” as a game mechanic. It made the frenzied shoot-outs manageable, and added an extra layer of fun.

As a movie, Max Payne does everything wrong. It’s based on a shooter game, so you’d think it would contain a plethora of action scenes. Well, it doesn’t have any action until a full hour into its one hour and forty minute runtime. That’s right. A full two-thirds of the movie is dedicated to fantastic dialogue and insightful character development. Nah, I’m kidding. It’s just Mark Wahlberg brooding and screaming at people.

Ted is Stuffed Full of Shit

“From the creator of Family Guy”? There’s a real selling point.

Seth MacFarlane has taken a massive dump on the public once again. His directorial debut is nothing more than a rehash of the same tired jokes and pathetic characters he’s been shitting at us for over a decade. This time movie-goers were subjected to his lame brand of “comedy.”

The biggest problem is that Seth MacFarlane has one idea. That is, a semi-dysfunctional family who resides in an everyday American town gets involved in wacky adventures with their talking animal. Family Guy: talking dog (which died and was replaced by another talking dog). American Dad: talking alien and talking goldfish. The Cleveland Show: talking bears. And now Ted: talking teddy bear. Clearly, MacFarlane is a one-trick pony. He has absolutely no other ideas. Hell, he already had a talking bear on The Cleveland Show, and he recycled that on Ted. For fuck’s sake, how does this guy keep getting license to create new shows when every show is already exactly the same as the last?

The Book of Fallout

The apocalypse appears to be progressing nicely.

If there is one thing Hollywood knows how to do, it’s rip off something popular. When Gladiator was a surprise hit, we got a rush of sword and sandals epics including Troy (shitty), Alexander (shitty), and 300 (shitty). Next, when Lord of the Rings hit the jackpot, we got a shitload of epic fantasies like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (average-good depending on my mood), Eragon (shitty), and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (extra double shitty for such a retardedly long title). After that, Twilight has hit it big, and there have been a million goddamn clones of that.

It seems that the typical Hollywood executive thinks, “Oh man, if people loved [movie X], then they’ll definitely want to see 15 more movies in the exact same genre and style! I’m a fucking genius! More cocaine and hookers for everyone!” This is no more apparent than in the recent Denzel Washington movie The Book of Fallout 3, err sorry, I mean The Book of Eli.

So how exactly is this a typical Hollywood rip-off? Well, it’s not a rip-off in the same sense that the Dawn of the Dead remake spurned a decade’s worth of mediocre zombie movies. It’s more that it is a near duplicate, albeit an inferior one, of the incredibly popular video game Fallout 3. The game takes place in the post-apocalyptic United States (ok, nothing new there, I realize that), and it features the adventures of the “Lone Wanderer” through a barren wasteland (I know, still nothing new). What sets it apart from everything else was how well it portrayed all the minutiae of life in a post-apocalyptic world.