Review: Wanted

One bad movie, one bad metaphor

The summer movie season is upon us, and bright, new and often pleasantly violent feature films are leaping onto the silver screen like trained white tigers jumping through a hoop, aiming its ivory jaws for your adrenaline blood flowing in your jugular and the delicious cash flow in your wallet. Because these tigers need to buy lunch.

And here comes another rough beast. With a thin sugar coating of superficial Michael-Bay-worthy gratuitous explosions, car chases that defy physics, obligatory slow motion sequences, and inventive use of parkour and free running comes the movie Wanted. But really, this film (from Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov in his first English language film) is an ultimately flat, lifeless, brain-draining film that pales in comparison to Mark Millar's excellent Wanted comic book miniseries, which is the source material only in name.

This tiger is a bit on the thin side, definitely starved and skinny from the lack of any real meat to the plot. Worse yet, this film has no teeth, only wet gums that gnaws on your mind and eyes for 110 minutes but in the end leaves no real mark on memory or adrenaline level. Neither does it leave any painful memory-scars worth complaining about (or bragging, if you are of a MST3K or masochistic Plan 9 from Outer Space persuasion).

Wanted follows Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a hapless cubicle prisoner so insignificant that he can detail every pathetic detail of his worthless existence in the first few minutes of the film. His boss is a bitch who doesn't respect him. He has panic attacks. He has no backbone. His girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend. This opening scene is the only part of the film the least bit faithful to the original miniseries, and its tone is taken straight from Fight Club.

From here Wesley Gibson takes a quantum leap. The sexy Fox (Angelina Jolie) informs him that he is actually the son of a recently deceased master assassin, and sets wesley on an ascent into uber-badassness. Wesley becomes indoctrinated into the League of Assassins, and starts on a journey to kill Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), the man who killed his father.

Wanted also includes Morgan Freeman making an appearance as Sloan, the shadowy leader of the League of assassins, whose best moment is a short burst of profanity. Acclaimed rapper Common plays a small part as The Gunsmith and does stuff… with guns… for a minute or two…and that is pretty much it.

The Wanted miniseries is a sociopathogical, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners slaughterfest about BEING A FREAKING SUPERVILLAIN that takes place across multiple dimensions (how else are you going to acquire a kryptonite condom?) featuring analogues to your favorite comic book villains. In the comic Wesley Gibson exterminates cops for fun, takes diabolical super-villiany oaths over burning back issues of Marvel comics and rams a chair leg through a guy’s face.

The film is about assassins that can shoot curveball bullets and take orders from a magical loom.

Well, I have to give the film one kudus in the faithfulness category. The creators of the film really took the last line of the comic, "This is my face while I'm fucking you in the ass!" to heart when considering the product they'd treat their audience to.

But severe anal violation is much more memorable than this lazy action movie. It stands on a unique nascent internet level of badness: below rental level, at illegal stream level (not that I condone…. anything….)

Hollywood, nay, human civilization, has provided better, more entertaining and visually arresting action films than this minor genre picture. This movieis another sin against comic book films. Stick to the good faith, avoid this film, and pray to the holy 2008 comic book trinity of Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.

P.S. You get to see Angelina Julie's exposed backside. But making your way through the film for that brief moment of "release" is an even less rewarding than scrambling through my review to learn about this one minor "positive aspect." Not worth the dreck.