Max Payne

*1/2 – This 2008 critically panned adaptation of a 2001 critically acclaimed video game would have been better served by altering the title from “Max Payne” to “Max Pain” because that is what it inflicts on its poor unsuspecting audience. Due largely to the fact that it is extremely choppy and uneven, makes little to no sense in the plot department, and lead performers Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis seem to have great difficulty mustering any emotion whatsoever, this falls right into line with the majority of video game movies that have been produced (i.e. it’s nearly unwatchable). Tasked with spouting lines like “Yeah” and “He went that way”, Wahlberg and Kunis do very little to differentiate themselves from large, lumpy, somewhat animate planks of wood. If that’s not bad enough, the filmmakers decided to make every scene ludicrously dark with the exception of the ones in which there are blazing un battles, and solidified the movie’s crappiness by casting rapper Ludacris in a supporting role. There is one scene in which Wahlberg’s character has a massive gun battle against a fully armed SWAT team with only a pistol (with standard 13-round clip) in his possession. Flying in the face of the laws of the universe, this magical pistol fires at least 60 shots without ever being reloaded. That’s typical of the type of silliness to be found here. I would recommend avoiding this whether you are or are not a fan of the fairly solid video game franchise upon which this non-sensical flash-o-rama is based. Beau Bridges is in this. He should really try to emulate his brother Jeff a little more and try to get some work in movies that aren’t rubbish, and also lose a little weight.

Biutiful

*** - Geez oh man… talk about one depressing-assed movie. I mean, I’ve seen some gloomy movies before (“Schindler’s List” comes to mind) but this 2010 Spanish language character drama has got to be up there as one of the sadder ones I’ve seen in some time. Javier Bardem stars as a guy with two youngish kids and an estranged wife who works as a low level criminal living in the slums of Barcelona dealing mainly in black market goods and illegal immigrant transportation and storage. His main partners are his brother (who is also bopping his wife), a couple of gay Chinese guys who run a black market goods warehouse, and a bunch of Africans who he employs as his street vendors. Bardem’s character is diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and given a few months to live, which results in him to try to make amends with everyone around him. Unfortunately, it all backfires. His African street vendors are arrested and deported after a sting operation conducted by a cop who he was paying off but double-crossed him, about 25 illegal Chinese workers in his employ die in some sort of gas leak while sleeping in a basement, one of the queer Chinese guys kills the other one, and his wife goes on a bender and beats up one of his kids. And he also dies. It’s a pretty effective character study, but is so dark and depressing that it can be pretty hard to get through at times. Plus, it’s like two and half hours long, a length that I am not sure was entirely necessary, especially since the first and last 10 minutes of the movie were the exact same scene.

Tenure

**1/2 - This lightweight 2009 comedy starring Luke Wilson goes for a sort of Wes Anderson vibe but isn’t entirely successful. It has quirky characters, low-key comedic elements, an unusual score and a soundtrack full of indie-folk songs and slight keyboard/guitar noodling. However, it lacks the punch of an Anderson-made film (even his less than stellar recent effort “The Darjeeling Limited”) in that it doesn’t have the detail, artfulness or eccentricities that tend to make his movies so charming and sometimes hilarious. “Tenure” follows the story of Wilson as a professor at a small-time college in Pennsylvania who, despite being loved by all of his students, can’t get any of his work published and is having a difficult time achieving the desired status of tenured. Meanwhile, a new professor from Yale is hired as direct competition and Wilson and his overweight, bald, Oakley-wearing colleague played by David Koechner try to sabotage her career. There are subplots about his sister and his father and lots of jokes about horny old people and erectile dysfunction, but there’s really not much going on, and it ends up being pretty rigidly formulaic in the end. First-time writer/director Michael Million does a decent enough job in his dual role as his writing has some humor to it and his direction gets the job done. There is just nothing that really makes this stand out as anything better than average in its looks and the plot is about as mechanical as one is liable to find without it being extremely irritating. It’s not without its charm, and seems to have a decent message to it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it.