August 21, 2008
"...dreams have a nasty habit of going bad ..."
The greatest noir video game of all time is coming to the silver screen. And Max Payne is going to relive his long vengeful night once again.
Based on the 2001 video game from Remedy Entertainment, the Max Payne movie opens on October 17th and stars Mark Wahlberg in the title role as a cop out to avenge the murder of his wife and child.
IMDB tells me that Vladimir Lem and Alfred Woden aren't in the movie, but most of the rest of the characters make it: Alex Balder and Jim Bravura, B.B. Hensley and Jack Lupino, Nicole Horne and Mona Sax. Of course Mona Sax.
From the trailer at the Max Payne move website, I can see that New York is still caught in a slow but relentless snowstorm, and junkies are going crazy on the new drug Valkyr. I saw some action taking place in the Aesir Corporation offices, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the Ragna Rock nightclub. And Max still has his leather coat and gun.
One odd bit from the trailer is that there are several scenes in which we see strange demonic creatures. Valkyr users in the game were always muttering about "the flesh of fallen angels" and other strange occult themes, so I'm not sure if we're just seeing V illusions or if the filmmakers have taken the occult theme a little too seriously.
(Although, I have to admit that I'd played half of the Max Payne game before I stopped expecting vampires and demons to be part of the plot.)
It sounds like they're keeping Max's unforgiving internal dialog---although I didn't hear any exact lines lifted from the game---but in the trailer they've replaced Max's haunting violin theme with a somber guitar riff (taken from the Marilyn Manson song "If I Was Your Vampire"). The website has it looping in the background, and I've been listening to it as I wrote this. It seems to work.
No word on Lords and Ladies. Or Captain Baseball-Bat Boy.
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