Theatrical Review of Wanted

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In the following theatrical review, both Will and John provide their opinions of the film.

The Film According to Will:
The summer of 2008 is the summer of comic book movies. "Iron Man" kicked things off to rousing success and Marvel´s follow-up, "The Incredible Hulk," was almost as awesome. We´ve still got "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," "The Dark Knight," and the superhero take-off "Hancock." Though it might not seem like it, you can add "Wanted" to that list. The film was based on the Top Cow mini-series drawn by J.G. Jones and written by Mark Millar, both of whom served as producers on the project. Millar is currently one of the top writers at Marvel Comics and serves as a creative consultant for Marvel Studios. The feature-film version of "Wanted" is vastly different from the original source material. However, I´m of the mindset that the movie is the movie and the comic is the comic. Both should be able to stand on their own. Yet, I am still an obsessive fanboy at heart, so I´ll be reviewing "Wanted" the film on its own and in comparison to the comic.

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is an office drone slaving away in a cubicle. His boss always yells at him and his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. His job is terrible, his life is terrible and he knows it. He just can´t or won´t do anything about it. If you couldn´t figure any of that out on your own, Wesley helpfully informs us through his Chuck Palahniuk-inspired narration. Wesley´s father ran out on him years ago and he´s never heard from him since. That is, until the sultry Fox (Angelina Jolie) drops into his life. She tells Wesley his father was one of the greatest assassins in the world and was just murdered on a rooftop. Wesley is inducted into a ancient order of killers known as The Fraternity who take their orders from the Loom of Fate which weaves the names of their targets into its cloth. "Kill one save a thousand," that´s their motto.

He meets the Fraternity´s leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), who helps Wesley realize his potential when he orders him to shoot the wings off a swarm of houseflies. Other members include The Gunsmith (Common), The Exterminator (Konstantin Khabensky), The Repairman (Marc Warren), and The Butcher (Dato Baktadze). I think The Baker and The Candlestick Maker are being saved for the sequel. Every member of the Fraternity has a heart that beats at extraordinary speeds giving them an adrenaline boost that allows them to perform superhuman feats. They can also curve the trajectories of their bullets. How? It´s all in the wrists.

Wesley´s assassin training consists of taking vicious beatings from his colleagues, shooting corpses strung up on meat hooks, and riding the roofs of Chicago´s elevated trains. The better to prepare him for the inevitable showdown against his father´s killer, a Fraternity turncoat named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). That´s the plot in a nutshell. Sure, there are some twists and turns in the third act, but the story is incidental to the action. It´s as if the filmmakers came up with cool action sequences first and built the storyline around them. The first half of the film is Wesley´s training with the obligatory montage and a quick set of scenes following Wesley making his first kills. They might as well have just made "Wanted" entirely out of action montages set to Danny Elfman's pulse-pounding score.

The basic premise of the movie is completely ludicrous. We´re lead to believe that a small group of weavers a thousand years ago somehow discerned a secret code from the pattern in their cloth. How exactly did they do intel on their targets? They didn´t exactly have Google back then. And is the world of "Wanted" one without Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden? How does a secret society stay so secret when they´ve got members flying across skyscrapers, shooting it out in the middle of a crowded drug store, and evading swarms of police officers? While I´m all for, "It´s only a movie," but, come on, guys.

Director Timur Bekmambetov makes his American debut on "Wanted" after helming a pair of special effects blockbusters, "Night Watch," and "Day Watch," in his native Russia. Bekmambetov directs "Wanted" as if he were John Woo with ADD after someone substituted his Ritalin for Jolt and Red Bull. Bekmambetov cribs heavily from "The Matrix" utilizing bullet time and making the simple act of a victim shot through the head an excruciatingly elaborate production. Bekmambetov dips into a deep bag of tricks to further spice things up. He uses freeze frames, slow motion, fast motion, zoom-ins, zoom-outs, fast forwards, and rewinds. Bullets strike each other in mid-shot and slick sports cars flip through the air like circus acrobats. Some moviegoers will be astonished at the eye candy while more conservative audience members will likely get a migraine. Throughout it all, Bekmambetov keeps a dark sense of humor. A man gets smashed in the face with the keyboard; the letters and a tooth break off to spell out an obscenity. A laser sighting dots a Hindi woman´s Bindi and a bullet is engraved with the word, "Goodbye."

As far as the acting goes, it´s better than you´d expect from a film like this. Much like Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Norton, James McAvoy appears to be an unlikely choice to anchor a big-budget comic book movie. Yet, he equates himself well though not as much as his contemporaries. McAvoy begins the film with the flabbergasted, deer in the headlights demeanor that you´d expect from the comic relief sidekick and not the action hero lead. But, the Scottish actor sports an almost flawless American accent and pulls off the transformation from nebbish pushover into buff killing machine. Angelina Jolie plays up her image of steamy, sexpot as the tattooed, femme fatale Fox. She is everything a growing boy with raging hormones could want. The smoking hot, kick-ass fantasy girl you wished would drop into your life. When she kisses Wesley in front of his shrill ex-girlfriend, the guys in my theater cheered and hollered. And for those of you who thought they should have seen more when Ms. Jolie emerged from the water naked in "Beowulf," you won´t be disappointed here.

Five years ago, I would have said it was impossible for an actor the caliber of Morgan Freeman to participate in such a profane and violent spectacle. Nowadays, the man seems content to appear in sentimental, crowd pleasers like "The Bucket List" and "Evan Almighty," along with genre pictures like "Wanted" and the Batman franchise. As expected, he lends a bit of credibility to all the silliness and I did giggle like a schoolgirl when I heard Easy Reader curse up a Samuel L. Jackson storm. The filmmakers tried to throw the fanboys a bone with the casting of Terrence Stamp as the mysterious Pekwarsky. Like Freeman, Stamp brings a little extra gravitas to his miniscule part, but General Zod doesn´t get enough screen time and never makes anyone kneel before him.

Now, I switch into comic book geek mode. I pose the question, what is more preposterous? A hidden clan of assassins who take their orders from a giant sewing machine? Or a world where comic book super-villains actually exist and rule the world in secret after having defeated all the super-heroes in a massive war? The latter was the high concept premise of the original comic. Millar loosely based his creations on the rogues´ galleries of DC Comics to form an over-the-top, darkly humorous and nihilistic world. Producers snatched up the rights before the first issue even came out and had the screenwriters behind "2 Fast 2 Furious" and "3:10 To Yuma" ditch the super-villain angle and go off in their own direction. I doubt "Wanted" would have benefited from a 100%, straight-on adaptation ala "Sin City," but we´ve seen plenty of movies about assassins.

The super-villain plot would have been more unique and given us far more outlandish characters compared to the dull, generic supporting cast of the film. Mr. X and the Repairman don´t compare to a poop monster made of the feces from the 666 most evil humans in history. Maybe mainstream audiences just weren´t ready for Johnny Two-Dicks, a mobster with an evil, talking penis. While I agree with toning down the sheer amorality of the comic, I believe the film lost some of the hook and the acerbic wit of the source material. We´ve had poor attempts at the post-modern comic book movie ("Mystery Men," "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," "Hancock"), but I think "Wanted" could have broken through.

The Film According to John:
It´s very, very loud.
It´s very, very fast.
It´s very, very violent.
It´s very, very profane.

And like so many action movies these days, it´s based on a series of comic books.

OK, as younger folks would say, If it´s too loud, you´re too old. I don´t buy it. "Wanted" is simply loud for the sake of loudness. The movie endlessly and vociferously blares out Danny Elfman´s background score and a cacophony of bullets and explosions for the purpose of diverting attention from what little is actually happening on screen.

Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov maintains a relentless tempo throughout the film, never stopping for more than a moment here and there to allow one to breathe or collect one´s thoughts. These intervals of relative repose total maybe five minutes during the entire film. The audience for this kind of story probably expects and admires such a nonstop adrenaline rush, but for me it was like standing in the middle of a crowded freeway trying to survive. A few such sequences are fine and fun; an entire movie that never slows down is simply exhausting.

Anyway, what´s with this trend lately of unending violence? We saw it in "Shoot ´Em Up" and to a good extent in "The Hitman" (which this film greatly resembles), and in "Wanted" the filmmakers take it to the nth degree. One of Bekmambetov´s favorite shots (pun intended) shows a bullet entering and exiting a person´s head, usually in slow motion. Another favorite shot is having two bullets fired toward each other and meeting in the middle, colliding with one another. The first time we see these shots, they´re fascinating. The second time we see them, they're redundant. The third time they´re boring.

Then, in the event the decibel level of the soundtrack, the lightning-fast pace, and the constant blasting and killing don´t hold our attention, the director throws in a ton of profanity. None of the characters seem able to utter a complete sentence without a vulgarity thrown in. Does this make them tougher, or does it mean the movie is catering to its audience´s lowest common taste?

James McAvoy stars. This young actor has been making a diverse series of movies lately, taking on a different persona each time we see him. You may remember him as the gentle faun in "The Chronicles of Narnia," the idealistic doctor in "The Last King of Scotland," or the wronged lover in "Atonement." Here, he plays a loser, Wesley Gibson, an account executive whose life is an empty shell until an ancient "Fraternity of Assassins" recruit him into their midst and turn him into an action hero. So, a nobody becomes a somebody, and all he had to do in the transition was become a cold-blooded murderer.

The leader of the Fraternity, Sloan, played by the always bankable Morgan Freeman, tells Wesley that a rogue member of their brotherhood is trying to destroy them all, and that the rogue gunman has already started by killing Wesley´s father. The Fraternity want to train Wesley in the ways of their Order so that Wesley can avenge his father´s death. Angelina Jolie plays Wesley´s sexy mentor, and Terence Stamp plays his usual, now-patented "ominous" character.

Basically, that´s it. The first half of the movie, the best half, deals with Wesley´s training, and the second half, the bloodiest part, pits Wesley against a number of other assassins. He becomes a killing machine. Other people try to kill him, and he tries to kill other people. In most cases, he´s successful, and the body count rises exponentially.

The movie starts with a bang and never lets up, for good or for bad. The characters are mere props for the sake of the bloodletting. Beyond determining that Wesley is a washout in society, we learn little else. In "The Matrix," a film that "Wanted" would dearly love to be, we discovered a good deal about the main character before he became involved in the plot action. In "Wanted" poor Wesley shows a little reluctance at first to join in the fun and games, but then he suddenly jumps headlong into the mayhem with unbounded glee. For the first few minutes of the film, I had the impression we were in for a satire. There are some amusing bits early on, particularly in Wesley´s narration. However, it isn´t long before the filmmakers establish beyond a doubt that we are supposed to take everything in earnest. It´s too bad the movie takes itself so seriously, too, because there are plenty of chances for it to lighten up and wink at itself without becoming a self-parody.

Additionally, you get special effects. All kinds of special effects: slow motion, fast motion, CGI, bullets curving around objects, trains dangling on the edge of precipices, Dodge Vipers and Chevy Corvettes doing outlandish stunts; you name it, the film´s got it. But for what purpose? Because the filmmakers could do it.

I won´t say "Wanted" is without merit. Its stars shine, especially Ms. Jolie, who may be doing a reprise of her role in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" but at least does it with style and good grace. The colliding-bullets stunt I mentioned looks cool, at least the first time we see it. And the director knows how to choreograph a good action sequence, even if most of the movie looks like a "Matrix" clone.

Still, enough is enough. Without a solid plot or characters of any depth, the movie leaves us with nothing but a comic book. Which is, of course, the point of the film, I suppose. It´s for viewers who love the comic books on which the movie is based, or for those who want to dispense with anything requiring them to think. It´s for people who thought there wasn´t enough noise, blood, or violence in "Hitman," "Shoot ´Em Up," or "Planet Terror."

Summer is the time of year for big, dumb action flicks, some of them dumber than others. "Iron Man" proved that an action movie could be fun if its hero had a genuine personality and charisma one could enjoy. I left "Iron Man" wanting to see it again. I left "Wanted" with a headache.

John's Film Value: 4/10

Will's Final Thoughts:
While I share many of John´s points, I will have to admit that I do not share his high standards or refined tastes. Films like "Iron Man," "Die Hard," and "Terminator 2" have proven action flicks can still be intelligent with heart and a sharp script. "Wanted" has no intelligence, heart or a sharp script. "Wanted" is a loud, dumb action movie and sometimes that´s all I want. It might not be healthy, but I´ll pass on the filet mignon every once in a while for a Twinkie. "Wanted" is a Twinkie, a delicious, bloody, profane, bullet-riddled Twinkie. It´s a super-stylized, gun-toting guilty pleasure that´s not afraid to go for the hard R. It´s meant to attract the types of folks who love playing "Grand Theft Auto." If the action sequences hadn´t been as enjoyable, I might have given "Wanted" only a 5. However, I had a lot of fun with them and the movie appealed to my mentally deranged, inner child.

Will´s Film Value: 7/10

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