Max Payne lives up to his name within the first few seconds of the movie, where he reveals to us, “I don’t believe in heaven. I believe in pain. I believe in fear. I believe in death.” Nice to meet you, too! The whole movie never breaks away from this mood, it’s dark and depressing and angry throughout, so at least there is some consistency. But on the other hand, when the entire movie is dark blue and green from start to finish, it might start to bring you down a little bit, too.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Max Payne, an NYPD homicide detective who started working exclusively on cold case files since his wife and infant child were killed. He has become obsessed with finding their killer, as is to be expected, putting him in the perfect situation to become a one man army out for justice, as Steven Seagal might say. All of his leads go nowhere, until finally he finds a good one in the form of a vicious female assassin named Mona Sax.

It seems that Mona’s sister has also been killed, and after a few tense confrontations they learn that they may be looking for the same person.

Isn't there something ironic about this?

They form a tenuous partnership and are also joined by a couple of other allies, including BB, Max’s father’s former partner, and an Internal Affairs cops named Jim Bravura, played by Chris Bridges. Yeah, it’s true, Ludacris is playing a cop. Stranger things have happened, but I can’t really think of any right now.

Complicating matters is the fact that Bravura is mostly investigating Max’s involvement in some questionable deaths, and there is also the issue of a massive government conspiracy (which is too big for the rest of the movie to really handle right) involving, get this, a highly addictive drug that fills soldiers with peace instead of fear and provides a feeling of invincibility and superhuman abilities and is therefore an essential part of the war on terror. Anyone else thinking of RoboCop 2?

But here’s the catch. It only works on a small percentage of subjects, and all the rest suffer horrible hallucinations and debilitating side effects. But hey man, freedom isn’t free, right?

By the way, it should be noted that Max Payne is based on a video game, so don’t expect any exploration of the moral or political paradoxes that spring to mind when you think about drugging soldiers to make them feel good as they rush into battle. Can you imagine the talk radio firestorm that would cause? That would probably make for a more exciting movie!

I won’t reveal how, but late in the movie we learn that in Norse mythology, the only way to get to heaven is to die in violence. What a belief system, right? If you die in your sleep you go to hell! Isn’t that a little harsh? Yeah, but it makes for a good story catalyst for a mindless action movie.

The most interesting part of the movie is also left largely unexplored as well. Several times we see the world through the eyes of people who are on this drug, and it’s a dark, scary world inhabited by some huge, scary bird-like creatures. I don’t know the video game myself, but I imagine that this is one of the major adversaries. Unfortunately, in the movie version, it looks either out of place or too often out of sight.

Amaury Nolasco (Sucre from “Prison Break”) also has a significant role in the movie as one of the, ah, ‘casualties’ of this expermiental drug, and his performance is brooding and sluggish. Mostly all he is given to do is look scary with tattoos all over his face.

Mark Wahlberg and his forehead posed dramatically with a lot of guns for this movie.

Mark Wahlberg gives a satisfactory performance, although this kind of movie doesn’t ask much of an actor. His forehead does more acting than the rest of him, but that’s to be expected, right? I don’t know if you realize this, but one of the most important skills that an action movie star can do to be successful is wrinkle his forehead just right.

You thought Arnold Schwarzenegger became famous because of his muscles? Nope! It’s that square inch of valuable real estate right between his eyebrows. And Mark Wahlberg is blessed with the same natural gift as Arnold - the man just has a great action-movie-forehead.

There is nothing new or fresh in Max Payne, although it at least manages to play through without feeling entirely repetitive, so at least there’s that. It gives the feeling that Wahlberg is going through the motions because it’s essentially just a standard revenge movie. You might be better off just staying home and renting The Fugitive instead. It’s basically the same movie in color and without any bizarre winged creatures.

But, as the MPAA has ensured with it’s inexplicable PG-13 rating, kids age 13 and up are going to love every bloody, drug-induced minute of it.

Wow, the Coen’s are really swinging for the fences with the profanity and the grisly celebrity deaths in Burn After Reading. One of the strange byproducts of their comedy style is that they are among the few filmmakers that can put the f-word in nearly every single line in the entire movie and still keep it funny. I have a theory that it remains funny because, given the sheer weirdness of their stories, when one character after another repeatedly exclaims, “What the f—-?” we’re quite often pondering the same question.

Burn After Reading is an actor’s film, which is one of my recent favorite styles. Some movies are powered by special effects or violence or action or nudity or basic, unfiltered star power, but the actor’s film is something entirely different. It’s a film where every role is played by a well-known actor and their performances are so taylor-made and so spot-on that they almost overshadow the story itself. Some of the better recent examples are movies like Closer and Sideways. Here, it’s like the Coen’s took a series of actors that they wanted to put in a movie and built a story around characters that would fit each of them perfectly.

The movie is centered around a tiny, accidental occurrence that starts a massive sandstorm of chaos for a handful of very, very different people. John Malkovich plays a CIA official named Osborne Cox who is suffering from some kind of mysterious professional persecution when one day his secretary leaves a CD of his work files at the gym, where it is discovered by the janitor and incredulously analyzed by the peculiar staff.

Chad and Linda enjoy a life-altering moment.

Brad Pitt is Chad Feldheimer, a gum-chewing, mentally dim personal trainer at Hardbodies Gym, who “masterminds” a scheme to blackmail Osborne Cox for the lost CD, which he believes to be full of top secret national security information. Like the Coen’s with the whole movie, Pitt has a blast with the character, almost as if the whole thing is just a good time for him. Francis MacDormand plays Linda Litzke, one of Chad’s co-workers who is struggling with her body and her social life. Due in no small part to her own staggering insecurities, she has been effectively squeezed out of society in terms of romance. In a surprising moment of frankness, she visits a plastic surgeon inquiring about several cosmetic procedures. “I’d get laughed out of Hollywood with this body!” She exclaims.

George Clooney plays Harry Pfarrer who, like Linda, is desperately looking for love and screwing up left and right. He’s in an adulterous relationship with Tilda Swinton’s Katie Cox who, you might notice, shares a last name with the CIA official with the lost data CD. She’s a vicious, overbearing wench, but also one of the only characters in the movie who understands their surroundings.

Okay, so let me see if I can remember this right. Osborne and Katie Cox are married, but Katie is having an affair with Harry, who is obedient of her demands but a little overwhelmed. Harry meets Linda soon before she and Chad come across the CD and hit it off pretty well (he brings her into his basement and shows her a device of his own creation, and when she is thrilled at the sight of it, we know they’re perfect for each other), neither realizing how powerfully the shady elements of their lives are about to collide. As David Rasche’s CIA agent notes, “Everyone seems to be sleeping with everyone else.” Oh, what a tangled web we weave…

Harry - "What the f---?!?"

If you’re confused, don’t worry, you’re supposed to be. The plot of Burn After Reading is a distant backdrop to the sheer pleasure of watching these wacky characters bounce off each other. Most notably, the dialogue in the movie is one of it’s best qualities. This might sound belittling, but for those of you who don’t know, believable dialogue is one of the most difficult things to accomplish in filmmaking (or writing). It’s amazing how something that looks flawless on paper just doesn’t come out right on the screen, and equally amazing how often the discrepancy is ignored and thrown into the final cut. Not in this movie, man. Simple conversation is done so perfectly here that it takes a few minutes to realize that the content is total insanity.

In true Coen brothers form, the movie blends genres so effectively that it’s difficult to say if it’s a comedy that plays like an espionage thriller (and gets a little too violent once or twice) or a Hitchcockian political thriller that just happens to be hilarious. If it’s about anything, it’s about what would happen if your typical, low-IQ paranoiac really was being followed by the CIA or assassins or top secret government spies or whatever.

It’s such a weird combination of highly trained government operatives, overbearing wives, and average morons that it’s difficult to believe it’s all written for the screen. The Coen brothers are some of the only people working in Hollywood these days talented to come up with some fiction that must surely be stranger than truth.

And by the way, this guy's 45 years old. What the hell.