Mona Sax

Lore & Background

Mona appears in the first two games in the series, Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. She is the second player character in Max Payne 2 after Max, and her tragic love story with Max is the center of the game's storyline. Mona also appears as a major character in the 2008 film Max Payne and makes a cameo appearance in the multiplayer mode of Max Payne 3. In the first game, Mona is introduced as the 'evil twin' of her younger sister Lisa, the abused wife of the Mafia boss Angelo Punchinello. She is a professional assassin living in a derelict theme park on Coney Island. By the end of the first game, Mona is shot by a sniper in the Aesir headquarters elevator, and her body disappears, leaving her fate ambiguous. In Max Payne 2, Mona reappears as a suspect in the murder of U.S. Senator Sebastian Gate. She is revealed to be the killer, and Max helps her evade execution. Eventually, she is shot in the back by Vladimir Lem, whom Max kills. Her death is not explicitly shown, and her fate remains ambiguous in the standard ending. There is no widely-known canonical statement from Dan Houser specifically about Mona's ambiguous fate.

In Their Own Story

The rain-slicked streets of a forgotten industrial district. A single shot echoes, then silence. Mona Sax lowers her smoking pistol, the body of a mob enforcer crumpling at her feet. She steps over it without a glance, her heels clicking on wet asphalt. In the distance, a siren wails. She lights a cigarette, the flame briefly illuminating her face—a mask of calm over a storm. 'Max,' she whispers to the night, 'you always did know how to find me.' The smoke curls upward, disappearing into the black sky like a ghost.

Reader's Guide

Mona does not appear in the gameplay of the first Max Payne game, but appears only in its cutscenes. She became playable in four chapters of Max Payne 2: 'Routing Her Synapses', 'Out of the Window', 'The Genius of the Hole', and 'A Losing Game'. In it, Mona's moves are more acrobatic than Max's, and her sections involve several sniping sequences where Mona is equipped with a Dragunov sniper rifle to provide cover fire for Max. Her signature weapon is a Desert Eagle. Mona was also included as a playable multiplayer character in the Classic Multiplayer Character Pack of Max Payne 3 Special Edition.

Did You Know?

• According to writer Sam Lake, when you are playing Mona in Max Payne 2, you are actually experiencing Max’s guess of the events.
• Mona's film actress Mila Kunis disliked her character's outfit in the film, describing it as 'a leather bustier and black pants and 5-inch heels' while others were bundled up.
• Mona has been praised as one of the few relatively complex, non-stereotypical female game characters, though some critics felt she still adhered to certain gender stereotypes.