Videogames adapted for film are Payne-ful to watch
Max Payne starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis and Beau
Bridges
When it comes to movies adapted from other sources, videogames
often offer the worst outcome. Though games have a lot more plot
than they used to back in the days of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.,
they often still come up lacking.
Videogames adapted for film are Payne-ful to watch
Max Payne starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis and Beau Bridges
When it comes to movies adapted from other sources, videogames often offer the worst outcome. Though games have a lot more plot than they used to back in the days of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros., they often still come up lacking.
The latest videogame to make the leap, “Max Payne,” missed the mark. In previews for the movie, it looked promising. You’ve got a brooding Mark Wahlberg as Payne, a sexy Mila Kunis as his partner in crime and animated valkyries coming after people just before they die.
But once the movie started rolling, all of that potential fell apart. The screenplay is written by Beau Thorne and adapted by Sam Lake’s concept of the 2001 videogame. Thorne lost me about half an hour into the movie. In it we have Payne, who is still broken up over the murder of his wife and child eight years ago.
Each night he goes out hunting for clues about the killer who was never caught, and that’s where the huge plot holes start coming in. He seems to be closing in on the killer, though he can’t tell who his friends are and who should be treated as an enemy. There is the internal affairs officer (Ludacris) who starts investigating Payne after a girl he met at a party mysteriously dies outside his apartment building. There is the former officer turned security guard (Beau Bridges) for a pharmeceutical company where Payne’s wife worked before her death who seems to always have Payne’s back. And there is Mona Sax (Mila Kunis), the sister of the dead girl who one second wants to kill Payne and the next wants to help him.
As for the valkyries – a creature from Norse mythology that combs the battlefield to select those who die most heroically in war – they were much cooler when I thought they were part of a monster-movie plot and a lot less cool when they turned out to be connected to some top-secret drug.
But “Max Payne” isn’t the first videogame turned movie to go wrong. Here a few others to avoid, unless you are an avid fan of a game and just can’t resist.
Super Mario Bros.: The Movie
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo star as Mario and Luigi in this 1993 feature film directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Though Nintendo developers are able to come up with new and better ways to play the game, the movie doesn’t have that special touch. In it, two Italian plumbers find themselves in an alternate universe where they need to fight a lizard king to save Princess Peach from destruction. Forget the movie, and just play a few games of MarioCart on the Wii instead.
Resident Evil
Which came first, “Biohazard” the videogame or “Resident Evil” the movie? Actually the videogame came first and then Paul W.S. Anderson thought it would be a great idea to write up a screenplay and direct this lab experiement gone wrong into a movie. In it a special military unit has to fight hundreds of scientists mutated into flesh-eating creatures. Alice (Milla Jovovich) fights off the mutants with the help of Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez) and Spence Parks (James Purefoy). By the end of the movie, after lots of gore and lots of dead bodies, Alice survives to live another day…at least until “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” and “Resident Evil: Extinction” came out and the fight started all over.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
This 2001 film directed by Simon West is really just an opportunity for teenage boys to see the busty Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) in live action. In it Lara is a rich British aristocrat, but she still enjoys crawling in dirty caves searching for ancient artifacts in short shorts and tight T-shirts. When a secret society is in search of an ancient talisman that will allow them to control time, Lara has to stop them. In the movie Jolie’s real-life father Jon Voight plays Lord Richard Croft. Daniel Craig, now known best as James Bond, also has a starring role. The second film, “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” is pretty much the same except Lara is chasing after a different artifact.
Tron
Since the movie version came out first, “Tron” technically is not based on a videogame, but since Walt Disney released the movie and the arcade game in the same year, it’s clear one was meant to sell the other. Back in 1982, videogames were still new so the graphics in the movie are actually better than the graphics in the game. Still, it is short on plot as most videogame movies are. In it Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a videogame programmer whose partner has ripped off his code. When he breaks into the company and tries to hack into the system, he finds himself sucked into a world that mixes live action and animation. He needs to win gladiator-style games in the computer world or he will die in the game and in real life.
