Max Payne (series)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The games:

  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Fans were recently pleased to hear Max's original voice actor is returning, and that some sections of the game will feature the younger, thinner, hair-having Max we all know and love.
    • Also when Rockstar revealed they had been sending builds/scripts of the game to Remedy to make sure they're on the right track.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Invoked by Max in the third game toward Serrano. Even after putting Max through hoards of gang members and killing an innocent woman, Max is willing to put it past them and let Serrano live (and let him have his revenge) cause he has "paid enough."
  • Anticlimax Boss: Kaufman, the near-mythical Mafia hitman that mooks warn you about through much of 2. Of course, this is a game that at least attempts at realism, so he reacts to hand grenades thrown at his feet just like everyone else.
    • To be fair he can take a lot more bullets than his mooks.
      • Although he does seem to have the same health as the commandos later, suggesting it's a bullet proof vest rather than sheer badass.
    • Rico Muerte, a very forgettable boss from early in the first game is described by Max as being 'a regular Keyser Soze'. When you track him down, he has his pants around his ankles and is receiving some extra-special treatment from prostitute Candy Dawn. He immediately runs off and hides in the hallway. None of the mooks seem to notice or care about him, and the only reason he's even notable is because he's your very first enemy with an automatic weapon.
      • Not only that, but said boss was hired to assassinate the mayor. Max dispenses with him rather rapidly.
  • Black Comedy
  • Breather Level:
    • The dream levels... well, as much as can be allowed. They're nightmarish and sometimes feature some combat.
    • The extremely brief level in the Punchinello Restaurant. Escaping the bombs going off around you is extremely fun, though.
    • The first half of the Address Unknown funhouse in the second game.
  • Complete Monster: Nicole Horne. The worst part is when she tells Max: "The deaths of your wife and daughter were necessary, inevitable; it is DONE. You cannot bring them back. Nothing you do will make it any better."
    • Victor Branco in the third game. The guy has both of his brothers assassinated-- one by burning him alive--in order to secure his personal wealth and political future, all while heading the mass-harvest of the poor and criminals for their organs.
  • Crazy Awesome: Brewer from Max Payne 3. A Robin Williams style neighbor of Max's with a hobo beard, military jacket covered in badges, a beanie, boxers, a semi-automatic shotgun, and a lot of wires sticking out of his coat. He arrives by shooting a thug ambushing Max in the face, then gives a short speech on the cleansing properties of fire and suicide bombs a squad of mobsters running down the hall. He makes a hell of an impression for a character with less than a minute of screentime.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Late Goodbye which was actually made by the band Poets of the Fall!
    • The third game's entire soundtrack is fantastic, but particular note should go to Combat Drugs, THOSE DRUMS
    • Not to mention Tears. Especially when it kicks in during the last shootout.
  • Darker and Edgier: Arguably the second game (see Indecisive Parody).
    • The third game is this in spades, it's much more gritty in comparison to the first two games.
  • 8.8: Gametrailers is already receiving flack for giving Max Payne 3 a 7.6.
  • Even Better Sequel
  • Fake Difficulty: The third game has a habit of dropping you out of cutscenes with a few dozen mooks shooting at you at once and overriding whatever you have equipped with a single handgun. Some times, it'll even take away your painkillers during a mid-level cutscene for no good reason.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The third game, for a variety of reasons. Sam Lake didn't write it, it changes the character for Max, it has a different tone then the first two, Max is fat and bald for the second half of the game, Mona didn't survive, ect.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point in the second game, Max is assisted by old, bald and bearded bum who used to be a cop. In the third game, Max is himself a fat, bald and bearded ex-cop.
    • The fake medieval soap opera "Lords and Ladies" is a little bit funnier to look back on in light of the blazing popularity of Game of Thrones.
    • When describing Bullet Time to a game reviewer, the developers likened to an elite athlete for whom the games seems to slow down around them. The reviewer described this as "Kobe Bryant with a Colt Commando." Many, many years later, Kobe Bryant appeared in advertising for Call of Duty Black Ops, toting a Colt Commando.
  • Indecisive Parody: The first game goes back and forth between over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek parody of gangster movies and film noir (replete with cartoonish villains and melodramatic Private Eye Monologue) and darker, more serious fare, such as Max's dream sequences. The second game, however, is much more consistently serious in tone (with occasional flashes of black comedy).
  • Iron Woobie: You'll notice that Max is pretty Stoic for someone who's going through a living hell.
  • It Was His Sled: Anyone who has played the first game is hardly surprised when B.B. is revealed to be one of the bad guys in the film.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Nicole Horne, a.k.a. "Ms. Valkyr," is catapulted straight over this line when it's revealed she was the one behind the murder of Max's family at the very start of the game.
  • Narm: Max's constipated expression in the first game. Also, in the first game, the mooks' screaming (AWWWW! OWAAHH! HUWOOOOOH!)
  • Narm Charm: Some of Max's monologues border on Wangst, yet they never fail to woobify him.
    • There's also his famous constipated expression mentioned directly above, that a lot of fans have love for.
  • Red Herring: Max finds some tarot cards belonging to Lisa Sax at one point and presumes that the Tower refers to the Punchinello Manor, the Devil refers to Punchinello and Death refers to Max himself. In fact, the Tower is the Aesir Corporation building and the Devil is Nicole Horne.
    • Also that isn't what those cards represent in the tarot. But then, Max probably would only know the stereotypical interpretations anyway, since the more accurate reading from them ends up coming true as well. The Tower is his past card and represents the death of his family, the Devil is his present and represents the antagonist of the game, and Death is his future which stands for how he changes to accepting what his life has become by the ending (before the second game at least).
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Every single game that comes out with Bullet Time now is met with dubious cries of "oh, another one?" Though the third game averted this as it received high scoes from both critics and fans.
  • Spiritual Licensee: The Max Payne games are some of the best John Woo games ever made before Stranglehold. Also Max Payne 3 seems to be heavily inspired by Man on Fire. Just look at the first trailer of the game when Max describes his situation and you will notice the similarities instantaneously.
    • It's to the point where it's Lampshaded in the first game, the password for one early part in John Woo, and Max said soon after that he'd need to make like Chow Yun-fat
  • Spoiler: At one point in the first game, one thug is discussing the Twist Ending of The Usual Suspects with another thug, who it turns out hasn't seen it.
    • In the second game, an amusement park funhouse level based on the show-within-a-show "Address Unknown" gives away the show's eventual The Killer in Me Twist Ending. Then when you return to the level later on (still well before the show "ends" in-game and Max has a chance to see it), it is lampshaded by one thug explaining the ending to another, and the other thug complaining of being spoiled.
  • That One Level: The two nightmare levels in the first Max Payne. They each start off cool and creepy, and then tack on an infuriating maze. The first maze has you running down featureless hallways endlessly until you take the right combination of turns. The second has you running around a maze of bloodtrails in otherwise featureless blackness. Every time you reach a dead end, a scream plays that exactly mirrors your own. It's even worse on the console, owing to the imprecise controller movement and use of checkpoints instead of quicksaves.
  • Tear Jerker
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Max's body and especially face received a Hollywood makeover for the sequel. YMMV on whether this was a good thing.
    • Averted with third game, which has so far received high scores from critics and fans alike.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The third game features women in the single-player plot only as Distressed Damsels or target practice for bad guys. Then there's the fact that it's essentially a white guy shooting up Brazilians...
    • The second bit is lampshaded by a boss, although it rings hollow due to his and other bad guys' actions.
  • Wangst: In 3 most of inner monologues delve into this. It's weird to see how Max, in drunk state, singlehandedly kills hundreds of mooks, yet complain about what a loser he is every ten steps. Lack of any other sort of Character Development and absence of comic reliefs doesn't help.

The film:

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