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| “ | I have tasted the flesh of fallen angels... I've tasted the Devil's green blood. It runs in my veins. I have seen beyond the world of skin, the architecture of blood and bone marrow... Death is coming... She is coming, and Hell follows with her. This is the twighlight winter. I am ready to be her son! Her time is now, and all who stand in her way... must die! [He laughs] Die! You'll die, you'll die, now, all die. [He howls again] THE WOLF! | „ |
| ~ Jack Lupino's demented speech before the fight begins. |
Jack Lupino is a major antagonist of the 2001 third-person shooter game Max Payne. A drug-addicted underboss fascinated with the occult, he's an unhinged high-ranking member of the Punchinello crime family, and one of the key figures in the distribution of the Valkyr drug.
He was voiced by Jeff Gurner, who has also voiced one of the common mercenaries and the killer suits, as well as Levi Simon in Red Dead Redemption II.
He was portrayed by Rami Lehtimäki in the graphic novel cinematics of the game, and by Amaury Nolasco in the 2008 film.
Biography[]
After suffering the loss of his wife and daughter at the hands of junkies pumped with a mysterious designer drug, Valkyr, Max Payne joins the Drug Enforcement Administration and works for three years to link the drug to Jack Lupino, an underboss for the Punchinello crime family, which prompts him to begin his vendetta against everyone responsible for the death of his loved ones and infiltrate the family.
One fateful day, he receives a call from one of his two contacts in the D.E.A., B.B., who informs the protagonist about the new developments in the case regarding Jack Lupino and urges him to meet Alex Balder, his second contact, at the Roscoe Street Subway Station without any further elaborations. He arrives at the subway and almost immediately stumbles upon a dead body of a transit police officer and a bunch of the Punchinello family thugs in the middle of some large-scale criminal operation. While going deeper into the subway station and gunning down all the trigger-happy goons, Max gets to its abandoned part and figures out that the gangsters' target was the bank adjacent to the station, specifically the Aesir corporation documents stored there. By using the detonator and explosives left by the thugs to blow open the door leading to the station's exit, he finally meets Alex, who has no idea why he was summoned there in the first place and seems to be just as confused as Max. While the heroes continue their conversation, Alex is suddenly shot dead by an unknown perpetrator, leaving the protagonist devastated and even more eager to exact his revenge as quickly as possible, thus he exits the station and heads to the hotel owned by Lupino to find him personally.
However, once he reaches the hotel, Max only finds more problems in a form of the Finito Brothers, but at the same time becomes aware of the Valkyr operation going on inside the building and an infamous assassin, Rico Muerte, staying at the hotel. While blasting his way through the gangsters occupying the hotel, Max discovers that he's the main suspect in Alex's murder through the TVs and radios strewn about the place and that the police is already on it's way towards the hotel. In Muerte's hotel room he finds a letter linking Don Punchinello, the head of the crime family, to the case and later wipes out the rest of the dump's population, including Muerte himself and his favorite prostitute, Candy Dawn who works in the hotel. Still unsure of Lupino's location, Max Payne leaves the hotel and travels to Jack's tenement buildings to catch up to him in his suite.
Unbeknownst to him, the protagonist ends up in the epicenter of the mob war, as one of the nearby cars, and then multiple apartments explode as a result of the bombs planted by the Russian gang, with its leader, Vladimir Lem, coasting down the street in his black Mercedes Benz, observing the fruits of his labor. Max disrupts the criminal activities of a few pawn shops and enters a building adjacent to the one that holds Lupino's office, while the bombs keep ravaging the place and the police suddenly storm in. Max realizes that the fire escape stairs leading to Lupino's suite were destroyed, so he takes a shortcut through the laundry, but not without the help from an unarmed thug who knows the password demanded by the crooks inside the laundry. He uses the elevator to get to the top and eventually reaches the desired building by walking on the pipes from the roof to a window. He ascends the decrepit building filled with gangsters and bombs, when he finally finds the office, where he runs into Jack's neurotic right-hand man Vinnie Gognitti, in the middle of lecturing a couple of thugs on their poor job of killing Payne. He injures Vinnie in the ensuing struggle by shooting him in the abdomen, forcing him to retreat, thus starting a lengthy chase, with Max pursuing a bleeding and terrified Gognitti along the rooftops and many other apartments. In the end Max corners him in an alley and injures him even further, then interrogates the lying man on the spot. Having no other options, Vinnie caves in and confesses that his boss is currently at Ragna Rock, Lupino's private nightclub. Max leaves the weasel and follows Gognitti's lead, proceeding towards the shady location.
An old theater repurposed into a sleazy nightclub full of V-junkies and Lupino's goons, Ragna Rock is the last and most promising location of interest for Max in his search for its owner. Since the main entrance is locked, he has to pull a secret lever in a ticket booth nearby to reveal a hidden passage to the storage where, beside drugs and alcohol, he's surprised to find the shelves stocked with books. One in particular, titled "The Age of Murder and Storm", catches the protagonist's eye and he inspects the summary on its back, which mentions Ragnarok, the Norse version of the apocalypse. With the apparent correlation between the book's contents, the club's name and the city's sorrowful state, this object is the first testament to Lupino's madness. Max presses onward through the bars and dancefloors bathed in the neon light and adorned with the satanic symbols, whilst plowing through Lupino's goon squad, when he comes across another evidence of Lupino's mental decline - more books dealing with the occult and the infernal, horror videos and a couple of Ouija boards, all piled up on the table next to the nonsensical bloody drawings on the wall and a lit candle. Detecting a disturbing pattern in Lupino's obsession, unlike all the items laid in front of him, the thought of the mob boss taking these topics seriously doesn't seem humorous to Max. He proceeds upstairs through the maintenance areas, where the club's flimsy façade slips even further, exposing the herds of nervous goons timidly conversing on their boss's insanity, while surrounded by the transparent tubes full of V and suitcases of dirty cash. Max disperses the meeting in a habitual manner and ascends the stairs to the roof, where he braves the ceiling beams and the snow-clad top to get to the other side of the building, ending up in the backstage area. After tinkering with the backdrop controls and overcoming the faulty scaffolding, Max reaches Lupino's lair.
The first thing he remarks is the smell, a pungent combination of incense and a sickly sweet stench of rot. The decaying corpses of three gangsters lay in the center of the draped room, arranged in a circle around the pentagram on the floor, surrounded by the scented candles. To Max's left are the pieces of a letter scattered haphazardly on the sofa, covered in crimson fingerprints. Apparently, Don Punchinello had picked up on Lupino's lackluster business performance and tried to reinvigorate his interest by causally reminding him of the Trio, Punchinello's notorious henchmen, but it's clear that the madman wasn't deterred from meddling with the guy downstairs. Confirming this, to his right Payne finds a bunch of notes containing the usual mystical nonsense, a random mishmash list of demons and dark gods signed by Lupino with his own blood. Placed on the pedestal in a pentagram is Jack's notebook, in which he envisions himself as an aid to the imminent apocalypse, the Fenris Wolf. As the protagonist gets closer to the source of Lupino's sermons, which manically echo the contents of the drivel he had just read, the gate door closes behind him, leaving him in the spacious attic area decorated as an inner sanctum of sorts, completed with a fountain filled to the brim with the human blood. A lengthy gunfight between Max and Lupino's countless thugs ensues, before the draperies in the back of the sanctum open, revealing none other than Jack Lupino himself accompanied by his goons, standing in front of a sacrificial altar, with the stained glass image of Satan casting its light upon him. Now fully merged with his beastly alter-ego, Lupino spews out yet another demented speech, screaming, laughing and howling like a wolf, before attacking Max in his doped up amok. After giving Lupino everything he's got and more, Payne finally topples the fanatic and unloads a clip into his already dead body out of fear and disgust at the monster that Valkyr has turned Jack into.
Appearance[]
A far cry from his grossly warped psyche, Lupino's appearance is instead relatively mundane for the dweller of the criminal underworld. Somewhere between slightly overweight and burly, Jack is a Caucasian male in his late thirties/early forties with a shaved head, a short brown moustache, beard and hazel eyes. He sports a black and white Hawaiian shirt with a psychedelic design and a grey T-shirt underneath, black pants held by a belt and leather boots. The only truly notable feature of his is a tattoo that resembles either flames or tendrils around his left eye and spreads all the way to his forehead, left cheek and ear. Additionally, he wields a sawn-off shotgun.
Personality[]
| “ | The Flesh of Fallen Angels! Come to me all! Asteroth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Bapholada, Lucifer, Loki, Satan, Cthulhu, Lilith, Della! Blood, to you all! Shh... Secrets... living under the skin of reality. I've seen it, the corruption of flesh. [He howls] I'm the wolf, yeah! I am the wolf! It's close, it's coming. You have come. The witness to the end, of time. It's now! I will rise to her side! [He laughs crazily] I don't need the words! I'm beyond the words! | „ |
| ~ Lupino to Max as he gets closer to the attic area. |
Very little is known about Lupino's temper and traits before his downward spiral as a result of Valkyr usage. Judging by what can be picked up from the protagonist's own brief descriptions of his "career practices" and firsthand interactions with the facilities under his reign, Lupino once was a well-established, business-savvy and ruthless mobster with a mostly profit-oriented mindset, earning money for the Punchinello family with no regard for morals or honor and by any means necessary, starting from run-of-the-mill rackets such as prostitution and ending with crimes of the worst kind. Befitting of a far-sighted and manipulative businessman, Lupino has multiple pawns and right-hand men to control and regulate his operations, all integrated into a plethora of inconspicuous, small-time structures, such as laundromats, liquor stores and shops, with the most prominent figures being the Finito brothers, the men in charge of overseeing Lupino's hotel, and Vinnie Gognitti, Jack's main organizer and supervisor of the deals commenced by him. This complicated system, however, was left to stagnate and deteriorate after Lupino's attention has shifted towards mysticism and everything supernatural.
It's never specified as to what made Lupino resort to Valkyr, but it has profoundly affected his reason and sense of self, possibly even leading him to develop a macabre fixation on the occult, though he might have been interested in the Norse mythology and came up with the club's theme prior to his transformation into a delirious zealot, with the drug exacerbating his pre-existing tendencies towards fanaticism and homicidal behavior. Although it's hinted that Lupino was always an imposing and reputable mobster with his subordinates unquestionably following his orders, it's apparent that the respect they once had for him has long since been replaced by sheer terror, prompting gangsters to speak in a hushed tone of the senseless murders of Dino and the members of his own goon squad, instilling unadulterated fear into the hearts of the cowardly Gognitti and the seasoned, stone-cold criminals alike with his unpredictable bouts of drug-fueled rage, religious delusions and complete disregard for Punchinello's authority and the Trio's formidable status.
Whether inside his dilapidated, sexually egregious hotel that leaves nothing to the imagination or his tastelessly grotesque nightclub full of cabalistic depictions, one can't help but notice a correlation between their raw, explicit interiors and Lupino's own overtly twisted demeanor, with these buildings, perhaps, mirroring their owner's unstable nature and offering a peek into his troubled mind, though it's left ambiguous if the hotel's services were influenced by Lupino's sexual deviancy or if he deals with these perversions exclusively for the sake of advancing his monetary gain.
Ranting with fervor and eloquence worthy of a priest, at least at the time of his encounter with Max, Lupino seems to be virtually distant from reality, perceiving his relationship with Nicole Horne as that of an all-powerful monstrous wolf aiding the Valkyrie or even Death herself in bringing about the apocalypse and seeing Valkyr as "the Devil's green blood" or "the flesh of fallen angels" that allows him to transcend the measly mortal perception. The confusion about Horne's image in Lupino's head comes from the sorrowful state of his belief system, which was initially based solely on the Norse mythology, but later, as his mental dissolution progressed and his distorted mind coveted more occult stimuli, became a garbled amalgamation of aspects from various contradictory religions, fictitious and not, from classic, thought-provoking reading like "Paradise Lost" and low-grade pulp fiction and horror movies, with different elements crudely attached to each other instead of being interwoven seamlessly, where Cthulhu coexists with Loki and Faustian contracts are made alongside grisly human sacrifices.
Powers and Abilities[]
- Additional weaponry: To supplement the already devastating firepower of his sawn-off, Lupino occasionaly throws molotov cocktails at Max without worrying too much about hitting his two bodyguards.
- Enhanced durability: Thanks to Valkyr's analgesic and stimulating effects, Lupino's pain tolerance and endurance were amped up to the extreme, allowing him to shrug off even the most grave injuries and giving him an almost superhuman ability to survive 31 Desert Eagle and 13 shotgun body shots before expiring.
- Agility: Most likely as a result of Valkyr's properties and despite his bulky physique, Lupino's able to elegantly dodge Max's attacks by performing tactical rolls with surprising dexterity and maneuver around his sanctum at a decent pace.
Trivia[]
- In the graphic novel right before the fight, he's shown wielding an Ingram, but once the cutscene ends it's replaced with a sawn-off shotgun.
- Jack's surname is translated as "little wolf" from Italian, which is a peculiar coincidence considering his obsession with the Fenris Wolf.
External Links[]
- Jack Lupino on the Near Pure Evil Wiki
- Jack Lupino - Max Payne Wiki
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 Villains
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Max Payne Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Max Payne 3 Max Payne (film) See Also | ||