The result? Payne... A lot of Payne.

After returning from the mall, where I watched the new Max Payne movie with my girlfriend, I found myself pondering the question a gamer will more often than not ask himself through the course of his game-addicted life: Why can't Hollywood get one right?

So, however low my expectations had been, for I saw angels and creatures in the teaser, those were not even the low point on the whole experience. If you consider that my girlfriend, who, exhausted from work,  slept halfway through the movie, was the one that actually took some pleasure from the money she payed (popcorn, coke, air-conditioner environment fit for sleeping), you'll notice how bad it was.

For starters, remember the amazing plot about a cop that found her wife killed by a few drug addicts, who then surrenders his social life to the cause of wiping that drug from the streets, staying 2 years undercover in the process, only to find the only thing linking you to normal life, your partner, the guy you answer to on the DEA, dead and you as the sole suspect, making you run across frozen New York City driven on blood, coffee and pain killers? Remember that amazing tale of revenge that guided one of the most charismatic characters ever through his bloody path across the Italian Mafia and pharmaceutical corporations? Well, throw it all in the trash.

For starters, B.B., backstabbing bastard, the guy that actually killed your partner in the game, and blamed you for it, is now an old man working for Aesir Corporation and, tah-dah, he's the main villain. No I'm not spoiling anything here. It's so blatant, this shallow bit of plot they called a movie, that you'll guess it within the first fifteen minutes into the movie.

Jim Bravura, the NY, donut-eating, white fatty, dirty mustache, standard good cop who's chasing you all across the city is now portraited by Ludacris (holy s...!), and he eventually becomes your ally (utter s...)!

Mona Sax, gun-for-hire, employed by the mafia, in the game, is now a mafioso, a leader of her own gang. What the hell? Why turn a great character, an expert assassin, into a gang boss who's really a nice lady who's just trying to look after her sister (who you meet in a party(????).

Basically, the movie attempts to take everything that made Max Payne appealing to gamers (its lack of moral judgements, it's basis on revenge, on Lex Talionis, eye-for-an-eye, blood soaked 'Noir York City', a tale in the underworld) into something appealing to the average public. How? By using the single most repeated formula in cop thrillers since the genre was invented in the early 1930's...

One killer got away...

Wow... One killer got away. Never seen that before... Oh, wait.

And the creatures, angels? Well, turns out they're quite possibly the one thing that saves the film from being a waste of time. They're a result of Valkyre, the drug from the game, and are overall a nice add to the feeling of 'a man torn apart', fully absent for the majority of the film.

2/10 for the film, and with the semester's finals coming up next week, I wondered if these three hours spent on the mall won't come back to bite me at my grades.

Right. Rant over, time to dive into that civil process book.