'Max Payne'

Most films adapted from video games have a pesky habit of achieving the entertainment value of watching someone else play that game for about two hours.

Fortunately, “Max Payne” eschews the monotonous first-person shooter mentality that has driven most video game movies, and focuses on actually developing a story.

Unfortunately, it finds plenty of other ways to be boring. For a film that’s as big and loud as this one, it sure has a hard time keeping your attention.

The clean-cut Mark Wahlberg is woefully miscast as the titular antihero – Max Payne is a gritty, mean and pissed off dude. The most Wahlberg manages to do to communicate that is not smile.

He’s supposed to be hell-bent on revenge after the unsolved murders of his wife and child, but it’s never convincing.

Max is joined in his quest for the truth by the mysterious Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) after the unsolved murder of her sister.

Mona roams the streets with her badass posse, but it’s never clear what her significance is in the grand scheme of things. “You know what I am,” she tells Max, but the audience sure doesn’t. All we know is that she wears a lot of eyeliner.

Director John Moore (“Behind Enemy Lines”) either fails or refuses to imbue his characters and their situations with any substance. No one expects a film like “Max Payne” to focus on character development, but as more and more random people come into the story and either die or kill someone else, it starts to matter less and less.

The supporting cast is mostly interchangeable (although I enjoyed a few unintentional laughs at the appearance of washed-up actors Chris O’Donnell and Beau Bridges,) and most of the middle of the film is expendable. You could cut out a random scene here or there, and no one would notice. It’s all bluster and filler.

What Moore does manage to achieve is a nice sense of style, constantly shrouding his version of New York City in shadow and a perpetual snowfall that never seems to touch the ground.

Moore owes a lot visually to the noir heritage, and films like “Sin City” and “The Matrix,” which means his film tends to feel a bit derivative at times.

Mostly though, it’s a solid visual spectacle, other than a hokey subplot that features utterly ridiculous-looking winged creatures.

Still, “Max Payne” has a big problem – its audience has no reason to feel invested in what happens.

Even the die-hard action fan requires a reason to care, and although the film serves as passable entertainment if you’re willing to shut off your brain, Wahlberg fails to create any connection between his character and the audience.

His plight in the film may be dramatic, but five minutes after you’re out of the theater, who cares?

— Dusty Somers is a journalism junior.

2.5/5 stars

‘The secret life of bees’

Dakota Fanning must be stopped. I’m serious.

The scenery-chewing 14-year-old has engaged in her fair share of histrionics in films up to this point, but never has it been so overwrought and obnoxious as in “The Secret Life of Bees,” a racial tension drama based on the bestselling novel by Sue Monk Kidd.

Fanning plays Lily, a girl whose mother died tragically and whose father has an anger problem he deals with by forcing her to kneel on a pile of grits on the kitchen floor, shredding her knees. Lily has plenty of reason to be troubled, but subtlety has never been on Fanning’s radar, and she plays it with a typically overacted series of emotional breakdowns.

The film is set in racially charged South Carolina during the 1960s, and follows Lily as she runs away from home with her caretaker Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) after Rosaleen is nearly beaten to death by several white men.

Desperate for shelter, they come across the home of the Boatwright sisters, August, June and May (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo). Originally women in their 60s in the book, their ages have been cut in half for the film for obvious reasons.

It may be a lazy metaphor, but the entire screenplay is coated with the same kind of sweet, sticky honey that the Boatwright sisters produce. On the saccharine scale, this one falls somewhere around the sweetness-induced coma level.

If having your heartstrings yanked on for nearly two hours is your thing, “The Secret Life of Bees” is your kind of film. This is a movie that makes no pretense about its goal to emotionally manipulate the audience, and I can respect that. In this regard, Fanning was the perfect casting choice – her acting and the guidance she’s been given by many directors has been nothing but an exercise in manipulation.

Fortunately, the older actors give their characters a little more nuance, even if the screenplay doesn’t offer much.

Latifah anchors the film with a solid performance, even though her character description probably said little more than “a kindly black woman” and Keys is good as the bitchy sister, but it’s Okonedo who really stands out in an emotionally-driven performance that thankfully shows some restraint. Jennifer Hudson, who hasn’t landed a decent role since her Oscar-winning debut in “Dreamgirls,” kind of gets pushed to the side though, and finds herself without much to do.

“The Secret Life of Bees” knows exactly what its target demographic is, and I’m sure those that fall within it will see it in droves. It’s the kind of movie that has a built-in audience who will give it nothing but glowing reports as long as it strives to be inspirational and leaves its audience with a happy feeling.

“The Secret Life of Bees” holds up its end of the bargain. Just be prepared for that inevitable stomachache that comes as the result of too many sweets.

— Dusty Somers/The Daily

3/5 stars