Max Payne

FILM CRITICS tend to be a tad stuffy about adaptations of video games. It is, they like to say, no wonder the movies are so dreadful when they are derived from such trivial diversions. Surely, directors would be better off making films out of Greek tragedies or Byzantine icons. You know how these rants go.

In truth, the real shame is that, rather than video games being unworthy of cinema, the adaptations tend to be a great deal dumber than their digital source material. Here is a case in point. Max Payne, an imaginative, exciting, third-person shooter, has been turned into a lumbering, incoherent, only intermittently bearable thriller with less intellectual depth than Ms Pac-Man.

The scribble that stands for a plot focuses on a New York detective (a sedated Mark Wahlberg), recently widowed following a fishy burglary, as he investigates a conspiracy that takes in murdered prostitutes, deadly wraiths and Jeff Bridges's less famous brother. At every corner, femmes fatales await with well- oiled machine guns. Every hat hides a pair of devious eyes. So it goes in the City That Never Makes Sense.

John Moore, the Dundalk-born director of Behind Enemy Lines, has some gift for organising violence, but, if he has any talent for motivating actors, it fails to show itself in this festival of deadened muttering and gabbled exposition. Worse, however, than the poor performances and unnecessarily tangled story is the truly nauseating production design.

Somebody in the team appears to have seen Sin City- on, perhaps, an eighth-generation VHS while blind drunk - and decided to have a crack at replicating that film's quasi-expressionist take on comic- book grammar.

As a result, the backgrounds almost look as if they have been drawn in India ink and the bold light sources almost wash the faces into monochrome. But, this being a terminally half-baked piece of work, it ends up coming across like a Steve Silvermint commercial from the 1970s (ask your dad, junior).

Still, Max Paynemade it to No 1 at the US box-office and confirmed the affable Moore as our nation's most commercially successful director. Pow! Splat! Take that, Neil and Jim.