Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
7/8/08
When
you put The Matrix and Fight Club into a blender, what do
you get? Amazing visuals, a whole hell of a lot of violence, and
a fundamental conflict between a story of epic, selfless heroism and a
black-hearted satire of impotent wage slave rage waiting for an outlet.
Wanted, the English language directorial debut of Night Watch's
Timur Bekmambetov, struggles with that contradiction, and often comes out
on the side of stone cold sociopathy. But the final scenes reveal
that all this carnage is actually headed someplace quite interesting and
the film's dazzlingly impossible homicides are something to behold, at
least for a while. What's ironic about Wanted is that while
it's positioned as empty calorie Summer eye candy, it's actually one of
those movies that's more interesting to discuss after seeing than it is
to watch.
Our
narrator is Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a pathetic office drone who lives
in fear of his boss (Lorna Scott) and can't stand his girlfriend (Kristen
Hagar), who he knows is cheating on him with his best friend (Chris Pratt).
His life is changed by a fateful trip to the pharmacy, where he's approached
by Fox (Angelina Jolie), a ruthless assassin who informs him that his long-lost
father (David O'Hara), a fellow assassin, was killed just the day before
by a man named Cross (Thomas Krtschmann). Oh, and Cross is standing
RIGHT OVER THERE! And the chase is on, a highly improbably chase
that involves Fox and Cross shooting around corners and dancing their cars
off the sides of other vehicles like Fred Astaire. Finally, they
make it back to her headquarters, where Wesley meets Sloan (Morgan Freeman),
who explains to him that he was born with special powers that could, with
training, make him the equal of any assassin in The Fraternity. Ah,
yes, The Fraternity... an ancient society of weavers (you heard me right!)
who rely on a giant knitting machine called The Loom of Fate to churn out
fabric whose texture can be read like binary code. And what does
that code tell The Fraternity? Nothing much, just a list of people
they assume must die to prevent future atrocities. Ready for anything
other than more of his mediocre life, Wesley willingly undergoes brutal
training until he's ready to start killing strangers as an act of self-determination.
Although Cross is in hot pursuit, killing every Fraternity member he can
get his hands on, Wesley's life has never been better. After all,
who doesn't trust The Loom of Fate?
Wanted
gets off to a strong start as it details the private Hell through which
Wesley finds himself slogging: literally boxed in by his soul-crushing
job and too cowardly to bust out of a series of draining relationships.
Like Fight Club's emasculated members, he is the perfect recruit for a
violent cult, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more violent or cultish
group than The Fraternity. What knocks Wanted off course for
a good long while is that the movie itself falls for the company line and
revels in a lengthy orgy of pointless violence the madness of Sloan's Loom
of Doom can't even begin to justify (when the Fraternity's founders noticed
names allegedly woven into the cloth in binary code, what exactly gave
them the idea to start killing those people???).
McAvoy
is quite good as Loser Wesley, but doesn't always convince, particularly
physically, as Killing Machine Wesley. Jolie does what she does to
good effect: no actress working today can match her lethal coolness
in action roles, and her final scene is a knockout. I'm a huge, HUGE
Morgan Freeman fan, and it's great to see him mix in such a cold-blooded
character as Sloan with his usual run of wise elders. While a lot
of his screen time is taken up by action movie boilerplate, he gets a big
speech at the climax that is a career highlight. Kretschmann
always brings conviction to small roles, and Cross is no exception.
Terrence Stamp is also great in a role that's basically nothing but exposition.
The performances on the non-homicidal side of Wesley's life could probably
have been a little less broad, but since that's true across the board,
I'm inclined to chalk that one up to Bekmambetov rather than his actors.
The
violence is certainly cutting edge and remarkable. I'm not sure I
buy that anybody's wrist is nimble enough to fire a bullet around a corner
just by snapping the gun as you shoot, but I sure was impressed by a moment
when Fox “picks up” Wesley standing in the street by sliding her car in
a full-out spin right up to him at a perfect angle to knock him right into
the passenger's seat. In general, the car stunts are better than
the shooting ones because the film is better able to convince us that those
particular impossible feats (such as flipping one car through the air to
sail upside-down over top of another to shoot a man through his sun roof
before landing safely on the other side) can really happen. Less
impressive: boatloads of “training” that consists primarily of Wesley
being cut, beaten and generally tortured until he's ready to embrace his
destiny, and the movie's total disregard for civilian casualties.
After a while, all the violence without real rooting interest becomes numbing
rather than cool.
But
there is a point to this journey, one I can't really discuss without throwing
up the ******SPOILER WARNING****** You see, the movie's become so
cheerfully nihilistic that it's allowed us to forget that the Fraternity
is, in fact, a crazy violent cult whether the Loom of Fate is to be believed
or not. And, as it turns out, you really can't start murdering everyone
who gets in your way “for the greater good” without the greater good being
served by your own demise. It's a kicky twist, one which neatly indicts
the movie itself for equating violence with justice at the same time it
comments on our own recent misadventures with the concept of preemptive
war. *******END OF SPOILERS****** It's enough to redeem the
movie, making it more interesting in retrospect than it was as it unfolded,
but not quite enough to justify the full wallow in cheerful depravity that's
preceded it. There's certainly a post-Soviet anarchism to Bekmambetov's
direction, but while David Fincher was able to spin a similar set of incidents
into gold with Fight Club, Wanted lacks any sort of satirical
kick. To the bitter end, it's hard to say just how much of his lesson
Wesley or the movie has learned (although the bravura finish is pretty
cool).
Wanted
is extreme enough that it's likely to gather a cult following, perhaps
consisting primarily of cubicle drones with homicidal daydreams.
It's ultimately a good, interesting movie, but it's also a bit... much.
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