It all goes to hell when a street gang attempts to kidnap Rodrigo's trophy wife, and we're quickly drawn into a bloody war between drug runners, right-wing vigilantes and covert police forces who constantly clash and collude amid the squalor. Recruited as a private security contractor by an old police academy colleague, our hero is supposed to be looking after Rodrigo Branco and his brothers, a degenerate bunch of property magnates and party monsters, living the high life as the poverty piles up against their ultra secure apartment block. Here, it's the most enthralling hangover you'll ever have.īecause whatever else Max Payne 3 is, at its heart it's a blisteringly entertaining third-person shooter. It is a sustained conceit that, in less assured hands, could have become tiring and off-putting very quickly.
His battered state of mind is constantly communicated via a barrage of effects – from blurred, doubled graphics to saturated colours blooming over the screen like migraine flashes. Payne is a drunken wreck, delirious with grief over the murder of his wife and daughter a decade ago. But here, this isn't just about style, it's about subjectivity.
Indeed, Scott's entire ouvre is here it's in the agonised self-loathing of the lead character, the brutality of the choreographed set pieces and the hallucinogenic lighting that floods every scene with woozy oranges and yellows. Crammed into this story of a fallen cop seeking redemption as a bodyguard in the crime-ridden mega-city of Sao Paulo, there are snatches of Heat, Carlito's Way, Elite Squad and most obviously Man on Fire, Tony Scott's homage to bruised masculinity and doomed heroism. And with Max Payne 3, the third part in a downbeat shooter franchise adopted from Finnish developer Remedy, it has crafted a masterpiece of underworld carnality, depravity and violence.Īs soon as the action kicks off, Dan and Sam Houser – the enigmatic siblings who run the Rockstar behemoth and steer its creative output – bring their obsession with genre cinema to the fore. From the Latino sex clubs of GTA III: Vice City to the rickety saloon bars and whore houses of Red Dead Redemption, this company has always reveled in the sights, smells and pleasures of the low life. R ockstar knows how to do sleaze, that's for sure.
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