I guess Mark Wahlberg makes sense
Jul. 10th, 2008 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenI would have said Timothy Olyphant, myself, but Wahlberg's not too bad a fit for Max Payne. Trailer time!
(Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkling1 for the heads up.)
I'm kinda weirdly into the trailer and going "WTF TIMES TWENTY!?!"
Okay, wait, first off,darkling1 comes in to tell me he's seen the trailer and I'm all They're making a Max Payne movie? Then I watched the trailer and I'm trying to remember what even happened in the game. The game itself isn't special. The gameplay's only really unique feature was the pre-bullet-time bullet-time feature that allowed you to, provided you had enough amphetamines on you or something, slow down the action of everyone else and kill the shit out of them. Otherwise, it's standard kill the other dudes, eat something to heal yourself, here's a story to hang shoot-outs on.
The thing that really elevated Max Payne above other action games was the storytelling frame. It was a noir comic book--IN A VIDEO GAME. How awesome is that? AWESOME, I TELL YOU. Look at the menu screen and tell me that it doesn't strongly resemble every cover of every noir DVD you've ever seen. You can't because it does. And just like every good descent-into-madness-noir, it starts in sunshine, kinda like the last-score-before-retirement con movie. Here's Max smiling--unironically! The comic panels tell the story as Max goes through successive bosses trying to put a drug war to bed. (The drug in question is like PCP and you even get to go through a level tripping on it when one or another bad guy injects him with it.) So you have these comic panels telling a noir film story in between shooting shit up, chock full of overly dramatic, detailed observations on the failings of humanity and the beastliness of life. And, once or twice, a Femme Fatale With Her Own Agenda would pop up, flirt sexy, and shoot some shit, too. Mona. Man, she was cool. Femme fatales always are.
Anyway, it looks like some of the revenge-as-justice crusade Max goes on in the video game happens in the trailer, but then there's a lot of Dark City/Hellboy-ish fantastical shit going on, too, and I'm all Whaaaaaaa? I guess it has to do with the nutball boss you meet who thinks he's raising/possessed by dark gods. I'm all Um, but for the most part, the direction seems to lean, heavily, on that of the game, and the visual style of the game is so strong, that's not a bad decision at all. I'm gonna miss the comic panels, though."
Given Max's original actor, I'd say Timothy Olyphant is the better match. Mark Wahlberg makes a convincing tough, but most of the time it's a sort of showy tough. Timothy Olyphant has those crazy eyes and, yeah, okay, he's stick skinny, but he's got the eyes of serial killer. (kent_allard_jr is not surprised to hear that I had a crush on him since Scream 2.) The intensity is in his favor, as is the snark. Wahlberg isn't a "snarky" sort of funny. He's actually bizarrely sincere in everything he's in. You need someone with more attitude than just 'tude.
And pictures don't lie: Timothy Olyphant even dresses the part of Max Payne. No matter what, though, I'm going to miss the voice actor who did Max. The guy was obviously born to narrate noir heroes and nothing else. You can't get a voice like his without smoking industrial smoke stacks' worth of tobacco and then dragging your larynx over broken glass. Jesus.
(Thanks to
darkling1 for the heads up.)I'm kinda weirdly into the trailer and going "WTF TIMES TWENTY!?!"
Okay, wait, first off,
darkling1 comes in to tell me he's seen the trailer and I'm all They're making a Max Payne movie? Then I watched the trailer and I'm trying to remember what even happened in the game. The game itself isn't special. The gameplay's only really unique feature was the pre-bullet-time bullet-time feature that allowed you to, provided you had enough amphetamines on you or something, slow down the action of everyone else and kill the shit out of them. Otherwise, it's standard kill the other dudes, eat something to heal yourself, here's a story to hang shoot-outs on.The thing that really elevated Max Payne above other action games was the storytelling frame. It was a noir comic book--IN A VIDEO GAME. How awesome is that? AWESOME, I TELL YOU. Look at the menu screen and tell me that it doesn't strongly resemble every cover of every noir DVD you've ever seen. You can't because it does. And just like every good descent-into-madness-noir, it starts in sunshine, kinda like the last-score-before-retirement con movie. Here's Max smiling--unironically! The comic panels tell the story as Max goes through successive bosses trying to put a drug war to bed. (The drug in question is like PCP and you even get to go through a level tripping on it when one or another bad guy injects him with it.) So you have these comic panels telling a noir film story in between shooting shit up, chock full of overly dramatic, detailed observations on the failings of humanity and the beastliness of life. And, once or twice, a Femme Fatale With Her Own Agenda would pop up, flirt sexy, and shoot some shit, too. Mona. Man, she was cool. Femme fatales always are.
Anyway, it looks like some of the revenge-as-justice crusade Max goes on in the video game happens in the trailer, but then there's a lot of Dark City/Hellboy-ish fantastical shit going on, too, and I'm all Whaaaaaaa? I guess it has to do with the nutball boss you meet who thinks he's raising/possessed by dark gods. I'm all Um, but for the most part, the direction seems to lean, heavily, on that of the game, and the visual style of the game is so strong, that's not a bad decision at all. I'm gonna miss the comic panels, though."
Given Max's original actor, I'd say Timothy Olyphant is the better match. Mark Wahlberg makes a convincing tough, but most of the time it's a sort of showy tough. Timothy Olyphant has those crazy eyes and, yeah, okay, he's stick skinny, but he's got the eyes of serial killer. (
kent_allard_jr is not surprised to hear that I had a crush on him since Scream 2.) The intensity is in his favor, as is the snark. Wahlberg isn't a "snarky" sort of funny. He's actually bizarrely sincere in everything he's in. You need someone with more attitude than just 'tude.And pictures don't lie: Timothy Olyphant even dresses the part of Max Payne. No matter what, though, I'm going to miss the voice actor who did Max. The guy was obviously born to narrate noir heroes and nothing else. You can't get a voice like his without smoking industrial smoke stacks' worth of tobacco and then dragging your larynx over broken glass. Jesus.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-11 02:56 am (UTC)Other less opinionated parts of me also know that Olyphant was Hitman. Come on, you can't be Hitman and Max Payne.
But yeah, I don't like Olyphant. He sucked in the new Die Hard, which was otherwise pretty great in my book, Hitman looked awful (and yeah, he was, in my estimation, a big part of that), and he was merely passable in The Girl Next Door and Go (I'd have traded him for another actor in a second). I haven't seen Deadwood, but other people who dislked him in Die Hard say he's not any better there either.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-11 03:07 am (UTC)But the look is almost perfect. I've always felt that Max Payne (or, at least, the actor playing him in the first game) looked familiar. I'm thinking this is why--he is pretty eerily similar to Timothy Olyphant. (And Sebastian Spence, but he's even less of a nobody than the actor who played Max in the video game, so that doesn't matter.) With a game where the style and look were the game, you can't count out looks and style.
I'm perfectly happy to have Mark Wahlberg play it. I'm just shit confused as to what they're doing with this movie. And, again, I think there's a certain sense of--and this is bizarre, truly--wholesomeness to Mark Wahlberg that isn't entirely right by the character from the game. The character in the game is righteous and all, but he's also sort of a smart-ass and a douche. Mark Wahlberg doesn't really do skeezeball that I've seen. (Which is bizarre to the max since he's actually done time, from what I've heard.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-11 05:30 am (UTC)Olyphant sucking in Die Hard is half by comparison. All three of the previous villains are awesome, and before the movie came out it was rumored that Jeffrey Wright was playing the villain. But then there's also the part where Gabriel isn't remotely intimidating, and the scene where he basically pouts, nearly cries and throws a temper tantrum after Bruce kills his girlfriend.
Obviously the game and the movie are a stylized version of how Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch was formed, thus making Wahlberg the perfect choice.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-11 02:27 pm (UTC)Obviously the game and the movie are a stylized version of how Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch was formed, thus making Wahlberg the perfect choice.
...someone killed Marky Mark's family and shot him full of drugs!? Whoa.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-12 12:22 am (UTC)