Max Payne

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Turn off your mind, get tense and be dragged to the dark side.

Part revenge flick, part contemporary horror-thriller and all pretty silly, this visually stylish cinematic off-shoot of the Max Payne videogames comes off like the implosion of a Scandinavian fantasy comic, an American rogue-cop story and some fear-mongering about multinational drug companies in cahoots with the US military.

It helps that within a few minutes the obvious villain appears on screen so you've got the outcome, because then you can just focus on surfaces. And at that level Max Payne looks terrific.

This amalgam of interactive gaming and noir-thriller is set in a New York which is either soulless but gleaming corporate Modernism, or in snow-blown warehouses and sleet-whipped alleyways. The camera scans lovingly over industrial machinery, scarred walls, sweating flesh, and dank streets of snowfall and lashing rain.

Or, as in gameworld, adopts the viewpoint of the title character as he rampages through a bleached-out netherworld populated by bare-armed, drug-addicted killers and chilly corporate characters wrapped in expensive dark suits.

Detective Max Payne (Wahlberg, only required to utilise two emotions) lost his wife and baby three years previous to crazed killers.

What elevates this, if only slightly, beyond a routine vengeance flick is that the killers prowling these mean, shadowy and always freezing streets suffer visions of winged mythological demons. As you do. Oh, and in the background is that military experiment which went haywire.

If the weak story and beguiling look of Max Payne can keep your attention, you may be able to ignore the plot holes and problematic, continuity stuff.

Here, as in the passable

Shooter

last year, Wahlberg has looked like an actor in search of a franchise. Maybe he's found it with Max Payne but it won't be - unlike Matt Damon's role in the Bourne series - much of a stretch.

 Graham Reid

Cast:

Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Ludacris, Beau Bridges

D

irector:

John Moore

Running time:

100 mins

Rating:

R16

Screening:

SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley