It took me two years to get round to watching this one. I didn’t really have any anticipation for it or any desire to rush out and watch it. I found myself pressing the record button on the remote after reading it’s synopsis a couple years down the line figuring it’d be an easy watch after a busy weekend or something. Well, most of my uninformed preconceptions of this film were backed up by what I saw, an utterly ridiculous over the top combo of forgettable action scenes and a totally flawed story line. The first thing I want to mention, James McAvoy. I thought he played well, but I hated his character. The guy deserved everything shitty going on in his life. So he was in a job he hated, his girlfriend was cheating on him with his alleged best friend, although the film doesn’t show us any signs of a close friendship between him and his buddy, he was just a guy he works with. Apparently he doesn’t really care about anything in his life, he’s a confused unhappy dude in his late twenties and I cannot see how an audience is meant to identify with such an annoying character, he’s a fucking loser with little desire to pull his finger out and fix things. I think the only people that could avoid being distracted by this character are those who couldn’t give a crap about whether they like him or not and just want to watch explosions, average CGI driven action scenes and Angelina Jolie. Which to be honest seem to be the movies strong points as far as what ‘Wanted’ wanted to achieve.
The movie is based on a comic book of the same name. It’s a super hero movie about a superhero that doesn’t know he’s a superhero (yet). The setting is the modern day real world. Early on the movie shows us that people can fly, well kind of fly, it’s like the ‘glider’ version of flying, no propulsion system, but perfectly capable of being airborne when gifted with a certain set of flying related attributes (i.e. Wings, or being an assassin). Which gets us to the main part of the film, it’s about Assassins. They call themselves ‘The Fraternity’ and Morgan Freeman is their leader. So we see a guy killed in a pretty cool but totally impossible way at the beginning, the dude is McAvoys dad. So, McAvoy is then Recruited by the fraternity to be trained as an assassin( because he possesses the same powers, the ability to slow shit down, as his dead father) to track down and kill his father’s murderer, who incidentally is a defected member of the fraternity. Obviously McAvoy takes some convincing, but the inevitable change of heart comes around and he leaves his job (well kind of, he’s back in an office at the end of the movie, I couldn’t tell whether it was the same place or not) screams at his boss, takes his ‘ergonomic keyboard’ and uses it to smash his best buddies teeth out, which was actually pretty cool, I enjoyed this scene.
I have absolutely no idea what is involved in Assassin training, but I’d guess it’d take a while for you to pick up the necessary skills to become good at it, I mean so bloody good at killing that you could be considered the best in the world! Well, James McAvoy picks it up quickly. Morgan freeman gives him a gun and asks him to shoot the wings off a fly, so when ‘under pressure’ he demonstrates his natural ability to slow down time, zoom in with his zoom lens eyes, and accurately shoot the wings off a fly. Cool? Bullshit! Anyway McAvoys' character is just as annoying through all this training business, he questions everybody, loses his temper, storms off in a rage, he’s never happy this guy. The training looks pretty intense, they punch the hell out of him, stab him, slice him up, and he wakes up in this bath of wax type substance which drastically speeds up the healing process. I thought he was a cylon when I first saw this!! No Way, there's a 13th model!
Angelina Jolie is his mentor; she’s the one that accompanies him out on all his field training. She teaches him how to bend bullets too! This is the key; it seems, to being a top assassin, it made for some nice CG camera work, but regardless of how implausible the concept and physics behind bullet bending is, I didn’t even find it remotely cool, it just looked stupid. Our main character eventually becomes a fully fledged bullet bender but I don’t want to talk anymore about this stuff it speaks for itself.
Mr Freeman gives the order for his first assassination and demonstrates to us the way in which these assassinations are determined, although a nice idea, it seems utterly ridiculous that anybody even figured this out. The Fraternity are based in an old textile mill. There is this one textile sheet weaved a long long time ago that has a code weaved into it. It works by identifying signals in the stitching pattern which specify either ones or zeros’ which then represent letters, from which people’s names are constructed, these people are then assassinated. We then learn that this is all based on faith. People are only killed because the weaving says they should be, nobody knows why, it is assumed these people are going to do something bad.
This concept, however unique and a nice Idea, has a big problem. SPOILER: Eventually we learn that Morgan Freeman and his fraternity have been manipulating the orders. His name, and Jolies, and all the other assassins came up in the stitching and are identified as targets. This is a major turning point in the plot; we learn that McAvoy has been used. The guy he’s trying to kill is actually his dad who defected once he found out what Freemans character was doing. So, if ‘The Fraternity’ were targets of faith, what the fuck is the point in the textile! Who is it for? Who else is going to use it? You could make arguments for this, possibly the existing ‘Fraternity’ should be killed as they’re all bad people, but we still have allot of other people faith wants dead so ideally, somebody else could come in and take over deciphering the code and carrying out assassinations. Unfortunately this plot hole isn’t addressed. It could have been, but the story is definitely not strong enough to justify this sort of depth, its best left unsaid because this movie is really about the Action.
To add to this, I actually paused the movie to see the information sheet on which they detail the names of the people to be assassinated. Ok, this has major issues because specifics and scale are kind of forgotten about here. The information provided to the Fraternity on the people to be assassinated contains their names, height, gender, eye color etc. But no picture, and no location! You assume the textile from which they decipher this information is only concerned with this one city. There is no mention of locoation, international targets, having to travel with weapons and the means to kill in other countries etc, all targets a confined to the city for some reason. And what about the fact that alot of people in this world actually share name, first middle and surnames. If the movie had included this shit, either the textile would need to reveal more specific information or if ‘James Smith’s names came up, they’d have to kill every James Smith in the city to make sure they go t the right one. This system clearly needs refining.
Whilst we’re on the subject of plot holes and things that don’t work in this movie, when this turning point in the plot is revealed, I didn’t buy it as a surprise. All the way up to the point with the big fake looking shitty CGI train falling off its track into a huge fucking abyss like black hole, the film had constantly given us the impression that the guy who really is McAvoys’ father wants to kill him. We see him shooting at him multiple times! The movie starts to point out like we, the audience, are a bunch of idiots. “Back when he was trying to kill you, he in fact wasn’t trying to kill you, he was trying to protect you”. As far as we were concerned Mr Screenwriter, he was trying to fucking kill him! I felt like I was being ridiculed for paying attention.
I do need to remember though, this isn’t a movie where this really matters, the people this movie is aimed at probably don’t care that much. But I do, and I call it lazy.
On paper, the ideas for some of the action scenes must’ve been quite inspiring. There are 3 cool sounding (on paper) action scenarios in the movie I remember specifically and neither of them had any impact or looked remotely authentic. (I use the word “Authentic” lightly, just consider the CGI action scenes in Die Hard 4) they actually carried a certain authenticity along with their totally over the top and unrealistic execution, well I thought they did. Using the car to blow the helicopter out of the sky, totally ridiculous, but it could actually happen, it’s very possible with a car, a ramp and a helicopter. Wanted does not give a shit about this, they just want to go as crazy as possible. It’s a comic book superhero movie, I know this is fantasy, but still, the action scenes for me were crazy adventurous, but had very little physical impact in the scene. The crazy sunroof killing where Jolie has already anticipated this happening and decides to drive a car that can be used as a ramp, this idea sounds crazy if you could imagine it in its conceptual form, but to me I thought it looked crappy. The barrel roll into the side of the bus sounds awesome on paper, but the whole scene looked fake and had no impact on me. And the same with the car crashing through the side of the train, I know this kind of assumes you have seen the movie, and tells you nothing if you haven’t, but ‘I’m just saying I don’t dig on this sort of action, they’re just like video game FMV’s and I’ve seen better in non-game engine gears of war cut-scenes (I have nothing against the unreal engine though).
The movie was put together by three writers, all of which have been involved with writing fast and the furious movies. The director is Timur Bekmambetov the Russian guy who directed the night and day watch movies. I haven’t seen any of those but I will watch them when I get chance. I personally think the director did an ok job with the material he had. One of the movies strong points is its pacing. It flies forward and there is rarely something on screen that doesn’t grab your attention it just loses its appeal if you start to think about it. I didn’t hate the experience of watching this I merely found it frustrating and slightly offensive at times. The movie holds your hand all the way through, insults you for paying attention, and also manages to tell the audience how crappy their ordinary boring lives probably are. Fuck you Wanted.
I may be being a touch on the harsh side by saying that the movie doesn’t give you any indication that the dude McAvoy is out to kill (the guy who kills his father) is actually his father. There is one little clue, but doesn’t tell you anything at the time it only comes clear at the end but also involves probably the most annoying dialog in the whole film. So, I’ve just got to clear this up. His Dad does the Old bullet bending thing and shoots McAvoy in the arm about two thirds of the way through the film, (luckily he was facing in the right direction) but purposefully uses a type of bullet that would lodge in his arm and he would be able to remove and identify its origin (these assassin types usually like to conceal their bullets). This leads McAvoy to Terence Stamp, who is actually a good guy who knows his dad. Terence Stamp is awesome in his usual small but powerful role. So once this shit is all cleared up, and McAvoy is about to return to his normal life, Mr Stamp offers him a piece of advice, you might not call it advice, but he says ‘All his dad ever wanted for him was to live a normal life’ he didn’t want him involved in this dangerous world, he wanted to protect him from it. Well. Can you remember back to how fucking shitty this dudes life is, he’d become an assassin in something like 6 weeks, he’d been in gunfights, car crashes, he’d barrel rolled a fucking car, fell into the abyss on a train and survived, killed people, bent bullets, the dude had clearly got into this and was having a great time. So Stamps’ philosophical standpoint would’ve been fine if this is the only life McAvoys’ character had knew, but this wasn’t the case, he hated his normal life, and from my point of view, his normal life sucked. Bigtime.
If I’d have been McAvoys’ dad I would have sent him a text, written a letter, or even jumped him one night in the dark, and actually tried to explain things to him, or at least try, But no. The film makers think it’s more effective to just turn up and shoot bullets at him, sorry, shoot bullets at people standing next to him. Oh well, I suppose it works for the story.
