Apologies to the handful of Max Payne supporters out there who disagree with the sentiment that the Mark Wahlberg-fronted action thriller isn’t an egregious affront to the good name of cinema, but looking at how critics and audiences reacted, it would be fair to say those select few are in the minority.
A 16 percent approval rating from critics and 29 percent user rating on Rotten Tomatoes is about what it deserves, while the leading man’s Razzie nomination for Worst Actor was entirely merited. However, what makes it truly galling is that it’s easy to see why the video game genre has spent 30 years shaking off the label of being cursed when there are no less than 13 console-to-screen movies with worse scores than Max Payne on the aggregation site.
In its defense, some of the titles ranked lower include more than one directed by Uwe Boll, along with the likes of Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, and Hitman: Agent 47, all of which are objectively worse. And yet, it boggles the mind that in the entire history of feature films based on video games, there are only four to have made it above the coveted “Fresh” threshold of 60 percent, with no less than 18 scoring lower than 20 percent.
That’s another argument for another time, though, but Max Payne has at least captured an audience on the most unlikely streaming service imaginable. Per FlixPatrol, it’s made its way onto the Disney Plus global charts, a development nobody expected based both on the fact that it sucks and it’s not very Disney-esque.