Max Payne: The Film Noire Detective

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Max Payne is a third-person shooter video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published in 2001. It is set in modern New York and follows the eponymous DEA undercover agent who investigates the source of the designer drug Valkyr that caused deaths of his wife and daughter three years ago. At the beginning of the game, Max's cover is blown and he goes on a killing spree, targeting the distributors and masterminds behind Valkyr. The game borrows many stylistic elements from film noir and heroic bloodshed movies. A sequel, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, was released in 2003.

• Life knows two miseries; getting what you don't want and not getting what you want.
• I lied to myself that it was over. I was still alive, my loved ones were still dead. It wasn't over.
• I didn't deserve to walk away. There are no happy endings.
• A bomb went off in my head. The bullet lodged in my brain moved a fatal, microscopic distance.
• Everything had started out as black and white. Somewhere down the road, the line went blurry. The colors started to run, got smudged and gray. Winterson had been above my suspicion. It felt like a goodbye.
• There was a blind spot in my head, a bullet-shaped hole where the answers should be. Call it denial. I wanted to dig inside my skull and scrape out the pain.
• Kissing her, I think of the cold laws of cause and effect.
• Mona's appearance had triggered a dislocation.
• Schizophrenia. I felt elation, but with it, fear that all the past evils had come along for the ride.
• Home, sweet home. Something in the night felt like a door had been opened, an echo of the past, an old monster snapping its eyes open in the depths of my brain. Closing your eyes forces you to look at the darkness inside.
• A funhouse is a linear sequence of scares. Take it or leave it is the only choice given. Makes you think about free will: have our choices been made for us because of who we are?
• Mona had come through here, the dead cleaners is a sign of her passage.
• The past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. But it's like looking down into the grave of your love, or kissing the mouth of a gun, a bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off.
• Throw the rules out the window, odds are you'll go that way too.
• Like all the bad things in my life, it started with the death of a woman. I couldn't save her.
• The genius of the hole: no matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant.
• All this time we got the fable of Sleeping Beauty wrong. The prince didn't kiss her to wake her up. No one who slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up. It was the other way round. He kisses her to wake himself up from the nightmare that has brought him there.
• They were after me, it was my fault. You can't run from your past. You'll end up running in circles. Until you fall back down to the same hole you were trying to escape from, only the hole's grown deeper.
• Death is inevitable. Our fear of it makes us play safe, blocks out emotion. It's a losing game. Without passion you are already dead.
• There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask "why me?" and "what if?". When you look back and see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.
• The trouble with wanting something is the fear of losing it, or never getting it. The thought makes you weak.
• Now, like all my loves, she is mine forever. She has brought me here, to this moment of clarity, where time slows down, and I choose to look back, to see myself. And in that act of seeing, I am reborn.
• As surely as the bullet rips through the victim's flesh, organ and bone, it shatters the image of the man who pulls the trigger.
• The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting. And you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad. It could set you free.
• I didn't know what Mona wanted, if it was the same thing that I was after. To kill those who were trying to kill her. The bullet, real or imagined, lodged in her head routing her synapses. Driving her on.
• This is what I see when I look back. These moments, blinding as snow, they kill you, change you. You die and live again, remade.
• I had a bomb ticking in my head. No amount of painkillers would disable it.
• "The things that I want", by Max Payne. A smoke. A whiskey. For the sun to shine. I want to sleep to forget. To change the past. My wife and baby girl back. Unlimited ammo and a license to kill. Right then, more than anything, I wanted her.
• There are things in life you cannot choose: how you feel.
• Like always, the dead had all the answers I was missing. It wasn't that they weren't eager to talk; quite the contrary, the dead had plenty to say and once they started, they would never shut up. Their words would keep you awake at night.
• When you're waking up, the world is a blur. What was clear in a dream, suddenly makes no sense. No surreal rescues. No easy, magic way out. But you are awake.
• With no way to deal with the past, I kept my eyes on the road, off the rear-view mirror and the road-kill behind me. I chased lesser mysteries, other people's crimes.
• Einstein was right, time is relative to the observer. When you're looking down the barrel of a gun, time slows down. Your whole life flashes by, heartbreak and scars. Stay with it, and you can live a lifetime in that split second.
• This is love. When someone drags you from the wreckage when you have given in, ready to just lie there and die. This is love. When someone, no matter what the cost, shows you there is hope, a choice, that you can put down your gun. This is love. Love hurts.
• When entertainment turns into a surreal reflection of your life, you're a lucky man if you can laugh at the joke. Luck and I weren't on speaking terms, or maybe the place was just too damn lame to be funny.
• Your past has a way of sneaking up on you. You'll hear broken echoes of it everywhere, like a bad replay. You'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it's all in your head.
• You come to, amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn't spread, try to fix it?
• Firing a gun is a binary choice. Either you pull the trigger or you don't.
• The explosion in my apartment had started a fire. The flames couldn't burn away my past. They only made the shadows behind me leap higher.
• In a nightmare, every choice you make is a wrong one. I would wake up at night, afraid that day was a dream I'd forget.
• I am afraid. But I start again from the beginning, trace my own steps to the scene of the crime.
• The gilding on the mask had cracked to reveal the rot underneath.
• The world was getting too small for comfort.
• "Cleaners" was a misnomer. They were making a mess of it.
• I felt like I was walking into a trap.
• I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught.
• Fraternizing with the enemy. I had stepped over the edge. The cartoon moment when the gravity waits for the coyote to realize his mistake before the plunge.
• Mona was still the answer. I caught glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye, felt her presence everywhere I went. I was trying to trace her path, recreate the winding course of the magic bullet in her head. I couldn't find her.
• She was dead. The bullet in her head had come to the end of its slow-motion journey.
• I'd found the sniper's hideout. They'd been spying on me for days, weeks, months even. My every action, observed, recorded, analyzed. The place was the proof every paranoiac dreams of.
• I had tried to run from it, edit it out. Winterson was dead. I was a murderer.
• One thing left to do. I was compelled to give Vlad his gun back. One bullet at a time.
• Home is where your heart is … [Cleaner in distance, speaking to other cleaner: "Simple, not like in the movies where the hero has a chance to disarm the bomb."] Once, it would have been a house in the suburbs … [Cleaner in distance, again speaking to other cleaner: "He opens the door, and BOOM!"] Now, nothing was left of it … [The door is opened by a third cleaner and blows all three up, as well as the apartment] I wasn't happy with the way the cleaners were doing their job.
• Behind the door [7th floor of the apartment building] were the suites. They weren't an improvement on the regular apartments.
• Without Mona's help, I'd be a dead man. Suddenly, for the first time in I don't know how long, I realized, I didn't wish to be dead.
• [Over microphone] Vlad, shut up and stay alive, I'm coming.
• Mona, these guys are packing, close to overkill, hardcore professionals.
• I felt the rise of that old familiar feeling. I hated it. I welcomed it.
• [In a dream, in a cell labeled "paranoid"] Wait, just wait, I can figure this out, I can fix this. I can make it better! Just think. Think!
• It was all connected. The murder of Senator Gate, the Cleaners, the Inner Circle, Vinnie Gognitti. I had to make Winterson see it.
• Vinnie was about to piss his pants, he'd end up short circuiting the bomb and blowing us both up.
• Winterson would have found a way to do this nice, neat and clean. Logic told me backup should be on its way. Somebody must have heard the gunfire. Logic was such a liar.
• Mona's words on her being a "sitting duck" kept playing in my head. The bomb had misdirection written all over it.
• I couldn't crack her. I had to crack the case.
• Sometimes, something good comes out of it. Something you know you wouldn't deserve in a million years.
• You'd have to be a first-degree fool to fall for a woman who returns from the dead only to put a gun to your face.
• She was beautiful. I hated her for making me feel this way.
• Now that I was with her, I was reluctant to hear her answers.
• Your past is like pieces of a broken mirror. You try to pick them up, but you only end up cutting yourself.
• [Final quote] I had a dream of my wife. She was dead. But it was all right.
• It was almost morning, waking up from the American Dream. We are willing to suffer, to die for the things we care about. For love, for the right choices, Because of her, I had solved the case. My case. All of it. Who I am. Is it worth it? Saying that it never is would be a lie. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes, something good comes out of it. Something you know you wouldn't deserve in a million years. Something that gives you a reason to go on. Only said in the Dead on Arrival ending