20
Turning video games into movies may be one way for studios to coax teenagers away from their laptops, but this time around, the results are miserable, in every sense of the word.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
38
Max Payne couldn't be more appropriately named. Sitting through this stylish-looking but derivative, vacuous and bullet-riddled movie inflicts maximum pain.
20
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
The story has more holes than a shot-up metal door, the acting feels bored at best, and the intermittent action, while passable, hardly makes up for the downtime.
50
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
The film provides ample opportunity to attack the MPAA's hypocrisy. Max Payne is a bloodbath, yet it manages a PG-13 rating by keeping the explicitness of the killings just a whisker shy of what would be necessary for an R.
30
Stylishly made, armed to the teeth and ludicrous in the extreme.
30
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
A banal revenge melodrama-cum-detective story, but fans of the video game on which it is based should not be alarmed.
25
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.
25
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
It's just a grindingly inert death-wish thriller.
42
In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.
67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Sean Axmaker
A dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualizes better than he dramatizes.