A dark night in a city of cinema that knows how to keep its secrets. But on screen 12 of the Acme theatre, one man is trying to find the answers to film’s persistent questions. Dustin Noir, film critic.
The world of film is dark city of flickering neon, a few bright beacons feebly illuminating a mixture of torn fishnet stockings, blood stained cardboard boxes, and empty bottles floating down the sidewalks like glass vessels on river Styx, slowly carrying whispered sorrows into the steaming mouth of the underworld. But neon is a deceptive beacon, warm and inviting from a far, but close up marking a two-bit slut shop full of lifeless shadows feebly puppeteered by a balding man with dollar bills for eyes, the kinda guy who looks at your shoes instead of your face. When I first saw the neon sign for "Max Payne", I was drawn to it like moth to an exposed electrical fire. Shoulda known. Sometimes all you get flying towards neon is a thinner wallet and burnt wings.
8 o’clock. Sunday. The cheerful notes of church choirs were fading in the cold drizzle outside the theatre, a city weeping for the end of another lost weekend. The crowd was a mixed hodgepodge of baggy pants teens and grim couples too cheap or too bitter to venture forth with the rest of the happy world two nights before. No one sees movies on Sunday. No one but film critics and people trying to escape something crueler than two hours in a dark room with sticky floors and fluid stained armchairs. Lucky for you, that night I was both.
Twenty minutes into the flickering projection of what was supposed to be a film based on a video game and already the infectious boredom of the blank face teen who sold me the hours old popcorn I was now mindless chewing began to find a hold. For a movie based on a game about guns and bullet time there had been precious little of either. The exposition droned out of the screen like the ramblings of a drunken coed, disjointed phrases of half meaningless thoughts interrupted by occasional bouts of vomiting. The snarky New York detective story that had made the video game a pristine example of bleak noir had be cleaned away, like a hitman dissolving evidence with bucket of chlorine, leaving only torn curtains and broken glass behind.
The seedy underbelly of this film was hanging out for all to see, a chorus of dim characters being directed from a podium by a stony, emotionless Mark Wahlberg who could have easily drawn from his "Departed" performance, but instead decided to prowl around the film like a post-traumatic stress victim with a gun and an axe to grind. Once bullets began flying, my nodding head perked up a bit, a small glimmer of stars peaking through an overcast mix of cloud and smog. Even a noir review of a supposedly noir film has to give credit where it’s due.
The movie ended with a hidden scene after the credits, a advertisement for an empty theatre that had long ago been vacated, victims escaping their dark self imposed seclusion to wait for Monday’s start behind a tall glass of liquid apathy. Max Payne was not the promising young talent it could have been, it was just another painted up face on the street corner, offering cheap thrills and a promise not to be around when you woke up. If you can keep your eyes off the rest of it and focus on the muzzle flashes and the graceful dance of expended shotgun shells, you might actually walk away with something resembling enjoyment. If your looking for a faithful re-envisioning of a classic game and its titular antihero, just keep walking by and looking for that next bright spot of flickering hope around the corner in this film city of Gotham.
A dark night in a city of cinema that knows how to keep its secrets. But on screen 12 of the Acme theatre, one man is trying to find the answers to film’s persistent questions. Dustin Noir, film critic.