For the benefit of those who haven’t seen Max Payne yet, but are considering renting the DVD, I’m going to spoil as much of it as possible for you. Why? Because this is a film that shouldn’t be seen under any circumstances, even if you’re dragged off an airplane under the Presidential Directive of Rendition, and are placed in a dark room where CIA operatives intend to show it to you in order to forcefully extract information.

Forewarned is forearmed.

In the movie, based on the immensely popular 2001 videogame, Mark Wahlberg (The Departed, The Happening) stars as the titular character, a detective whose wife and infant son were brutally murdered by three home intruders, one of whom managed to escape and was never found. Despondent over the loss of his family and that the final assailant was never brought to justice, Max now works the Cold Case division of the NYPD, and in his spare time hunts down clues as to who the final killer might be.

Three years have passed since the murders, and one night Max tricks three punks into trying to rob him in a subway men’s room, and instead takes two of them down–riding one for clues while the third escapes into the darkness of the subway tracks. As the last punk flees, he is suddenly accosted by what appear to be winged demons (or possibly angels), before he meets his end as a train slams into him on its way to its final destination (ba-dum-bump!)

Max then heads to a club to gain more helpful info from the stoolie who led him to the subway punks. While there, he meets up with Russian hottie Natasha Sax (Olga Kurylenko) and her sister Mona (Mila Kunis). The girls enter into a heated debate before Max brings Natasha home to gain intel on a series of odd wing-shaped tattoos he spotted on one of the subway thugs, and which Natasha has as well. When Natasha unintentionally insults Max’s dead wife, he kicks her out of his place. Shortly afterward, Mona is murdered–seemingly by the selfsame demons from earlier, and Max soon becomes the prime suspect. Caring more about solving his wife’s murder than clearing his name soon plunges Max into a race to find the real killers, and eventually forces him to team up with Mona–head of a Russian mob family–before Max can be brought in by Lt. Jim Bravura (Chris “Ludicris” Bridges), another detective investigating both Natasha’s murder and that of Max’s old partner, in which Max is now also a suspect. (more…)