Word: max
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...intensity. In a season-opener—and with an opera that has not been performed in the Boston area for 25 years—the performers should have been drunk from the first-night excitement. But most of them merely seemed hung-over.Daniel Snyder, in the leading role of Max, sang with far more urgency than he acted. His movement and expression were often as wooden as the butt of his hunting rifle, which, for a character whose inner psychological turmoil is at the center of the opera, was not welcome. In the opera’s plot, Max...
...when a sexy babe named Natasha (Olga Kurylenko, who'll be James Bond's dangerous plaything in next month's Quantum of Solace) crosses paths with Max, she can read the romantic despair on his face. "What was her name?" she asks. Whose name? "The girl from the boring story you want to tell me." For a second we get a whiff of the movie Max Payne might have been: one that introduces standard contrivances only to upend them. Alas, this flash of wit is just another tease. Natasha is soon killed in an alley by unseen flying beasts...
...These wingy thingies are the movie's special-effects demons, and we finally catch a glimpse of one when one of Max's snitches, Owen Green (excellent sniveling by Joel Gordon), is teetering suicidally on his windowless window ledge; a nifty tracking shot out of Owen's apartment into the night reveals the 10-foot beast yanking him to his not-vivid-enough death...
...movie summons the usual suspects to populate the background: an implacable cop (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, also to be seen in RockNRolla); Max's ex-partner (Donal Logue) who suspects that he killed Natasha; and a big thug (the oddly but impressively muscled Amaury Nolasco) who's there to fight our grizzled hero. Beau Bridges offers consolation as an ex-cop (and partner of Max's father), now the head of security at the headquarters of the multinational company where Michelle used to work, and Chris O'Donnell fills in the plot as one of Michelle's old coworkers...
...these are just figures on a video screen, to be avoided or annihilated by this Max on a mission. At least in a video game the player decides who needs to be killed, and what trail to take in the labyrinth. The Max Payne moviegoers are passive hostages on a long ride they've taken so many times before. So gameboys are advised to man their PlayStations this weekend; action-movie fans in search of red meat can wait for the inevitably more graphic DVD version...