I can’t say I dig everything he’s been doing, but Mark
Wahlberg is on a hell of a roll. Fresh from The Departed he had Shooter and We
Own The Night, and he’s already jumped to The Lovely Bones and, um, Shyamalan’s
The Happening. Now there’s a new addition to his burgeoning slate: Max Payne,
the video game adaptation that’s only about five years out of date.
The PC game was full of John Woo-style gun battles and
became a big deal for a minute because it was one of the first to implement a bullet-time
combat mechanic in the post-Matrix world. The story is a cop potboiler involving
newfangled drugs, a dead family, undercover work and the mob. Furthermore, what
story it could boast was told through graphic novel cutscenes that seemed
pretty cool at the time. In retrospect, there was a lot of sub-Sin City work
going on there, but the kids liked it.
Trouble is, those kids are all grown up now; Max Payne
dropped in 2001.
Wahlberg is in talks to star as the titular troubled cop
for director John Moore, who has wowed us with The Omen remake, Flight of the
Phoenix and Behind Enemy Lines. (There’s actually one legit wow in there; you
can pick which film generates it.) The script is by Beau Thorne; Julie Yorn and
Scott Faye are producing for Firm Films.