http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=39210 Mark Whalberg as Max Payne... no mention of Sam Lake as a writer anymore. It's bad enough those assholes at Rockstar Games weaseled ownership of the franchise from Lake(considering Rockstar didn't do anything to make the games- Remedy developed, 3D Realms published, Rockstar did... who knows?) but now the movie is going to be a disappointment. One game movie they couldn't possibly screw up, and they're screwing it up. The key part of this is that Whalberg seems strongly opposed to guns, judging by his outburst against Charlton Heston. I hate these hypocrites. What does he think Max Payne DOES?
I'm excited about this - the original Max Payne is one of my top-five all-time favorites (along with Final Fantasy VI, Shining Force 3, Streets of Rage 2, and Gears of War) and Max Payne 2 gets an honorable mention on my top-10 (at number 11 or 12). And the ending credits theme of Max Payne 2 (entitled Late Goodbye) is by one of my favorite bands of this century, Poets of the Fall. They also did Lift, the ending credits music in 3DMark 05 Pro. What I'm desparately hoping is that Rockstar makes a Max Payne game based on the movie, and that the movie plot doesn't suck. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of Sam Lake being eliminated from the writing - that kinda sends up red flags. I'm not sure you can get the full noir experience of the games in a movie that doesn't have the same writer. Maybe my excitement just got dulled down to cautious optimism and extreme hope. And to answer your question of what Rockstar did, they published the console versions of both games. All that 3D Realms did was publish the PC version of the original.
Max Payne is awesome, they had better keep the over the top style for the film. Now if someone could hurry up and get to work on a God of War movie I would be very happy indeed...
