MAX PAYNE [2008]

Director John Moore brings a lot of visual style to his cinematic adaptation of the third-person shooter video game series Max Payne.
Thinly based upon the first game, Max, a fallen New York City detective obsessed over finding the murderer of his wife and child, while stumbling into a much larger case involving a new strain of powerful narcotics.
This mess of a film is riddled with bad dialogue, illogical plot advancements & actions and terrible acting from just about everyone involved.  If it's goal was to make Frank Miller's work look mature, then it succeeded on every level with the cheeseball violence and overly stylized gruffness.

1½ watches out of 5

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) has a wardrobe full of action jeans and hero vests; with jeans tightly buttoned he drives his truck into Chinatown and ends up helping a friend rescue a girl from a trio of Mortal Kombat-esque outcasts and a two-thousand-year-old evil sorcerer. Cue lightning, green flame, mythical beasts and an old man that stands seven-foot tall.
Oddly, Russell plays it mostly straight while all around him is a smorgasbord of awesome, and it works. Big Trouble in Little China is without a doubt the most successful and entertaining Chinese style action comedy made in the West that I've ever seen. (If you're interested, Carpenter was inspired by Tsui Harks Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)).

5 problems with your face out of 5