His Oscar nomination for The Departed has sure propelled Mark Wahlberg to the top of the Hollywood ladder. In the last 12 months he has secured himself…
The lead role in a sci-fi movie with M. Night Shyamalan titled The Happening.
He was chosen by Peter Jackson to be the male lead in The Lovely Bones, when Jackson literally had hours to find a replacement for Ryan Gosling.
He was also attached to the boxing biopic The Fighter, though despite his extensive months of training it looks like director Darren Aronofsky has instead decided to make The Wrestler with Nicolas Cage.
He was the first choice to lead G.I. Joe, though as we speculated it doesn’t look like he will be in the big summer tentpole for Paramount.
Instead the movie he will be filming early next year will be an adaptation of the Rockstar video game Max Payne, which has quickly been put together over at 20th Century Fox as a pre-strike movie and will be helmed by John Moore, the guy who brought us Behind Enemy Lines and the remakes to Flight of the Phoenix and The Omen.
Hardly a choice that stimulates much confidence.
I quite enjoyed the couple of hours I spent playing the game some years back, although just about all I can remember about it now is The Matrix rip-off “bullet time” mode, which was actually kinda cool to play with.
Here’s the plot synopsis given to us by Variety…
Wahlberg is negotiating to play the titular cop who is haunted by the tragic loss of his family and has little regard for rules as he investigates a series of mysterious murders. He finds himself up against an adversary bent on destroying Max and the streets he protects.
The script comes from Beau Thorne (whose CV I can’t find on IMDB).
Nice choice of lead actor and it will of course save the movie from failing financially. If The Punisher made $54 million worldwide with an unknown actor, this one should do at least the same and probably as much as the $95 million that Shooter made with Wahlberg last year.
In terms of the film’s actual quality? Not on your life will this be anything more than a popcorn movie.
5 Comments
gay….
I always thought Carlos Bernard (the guy who plays Tony Almeda in 24) would have made a great Max Payne if he shaved that little bit of beard he had just under his bottom lip. Alas, it seems it was not to be…
The director alone says this will be a POS. Another video game about to get FUBAR. must be some sort of curse.
If memory serves, Max Payne won some awards in the gaming industry for its story, when it first came out all those years ago. Here’s an idea then. Why not employ the guys who wrote ‘that’ story to develop the screenplay?
But yeah, generally anything that Hollywood are rushing out to beat the strike just makes me feel they are only doing it for the money, (which they are), rather than making any attempt whatsoever to make something that actually has any worth as a piece of cinema.
Max Payne was a great game (the sequel wasn’t too bad either) that was so overblown in its grittyness that it was definitely tongue-in-cheek. All the death and the misery of Payne was played for laughs as far as I can tell. Will that be reflected in the movie? I’m guessing not…