There’s something to be said for good old-fashioned guns, bullets, cars, and hot babes converging into a flurry of visually kinetic, pulse-pounding over-the-top action violence. All the more so when it occurs with creative relish and borderline fetishism yet without a single trace of apology. That’s exactly what Timur Bekmambetov’s WANTED does, and it’s precisely why it’s so much superficial fun.
The film starts out innocuously enough. Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a young man with no backbone. He works in a dead-end job where he gets repeatedly chewed out by his raging boss, suffers from crippling anxiety attacks, and pathetically turns a blind eye to the fact that his supposed best friend is sleeping with his grating girlfriend. Wesley, however, has a spine forcefully shoved into his back when Fox (Angelina Jolie) comes into his life (with a cacophony of guns, bullets, and cars), and informs young Wesley that he has a much greater destiny. He learns his estranged father was not only recently killed, but belonged to a guild of assassins called The Fraternity that take their orders from fate itself. To avenge his father’s death, Wesley must let the Fraternity unleash his inherent potential, and then realize his destiny. (On a side note, comic fans looking for a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel should look elsewhere, but not without hearing a choice word or two from me about the issue).
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Originally I was only interested in WANTED as a guilty pleasure, “>this featurette and this Red-Band (i.e. NSFW) Russian trailer for the film, have upgraded my anticipation into guilt-free excitement. You have to give credit to the people involved for completely turning around a film that nobody was really looking forward to, and many were passing off as a MATRIX rip-off. Now – if comment boards are any indication – it seems a lot of people are getting excited. Well, with some exceptions.
Check any comment board relating to WANTED, and you’ll inevitably come across some comic book fans bitching about how the film isn’t like the comic book, and bla bla bla. I get where they are coming from, don’t get me wrong. I read the series when it came out in issue form (and was often delayed). So I’m not some guy who doesn’t get it. Instead, I think it’s THEY who don’t get it. After all, even though comic book fans on the net are a loving and protective lot, they’re also knee-jerky and almost instinctively negative.
Movies work differently. Movies, unlike comic books, have to appeal to a massively larger audience. Movies need to have human, relatable character, even if they’re villains. It’s the reason Hollywood always softens anti-hero/villains, because the majority of the movie going public will not follow or watch a completely unredeemable protagonist. Hollywood wants anti-heroes as protagonists, not morally deficient villains in a world where that’s all there is, and all superheroes have been murdered.
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The advertising for WANTED really really wants you to know that Angelina Jolie is in this film. First we had this poster from the New York Comic Con. Now we get this one. It’s not just that they want us to know Mrs. Brad Pitt is in this, they want us to know she’s friggin’ bad ass to boot. I mean do you see those tats? I mean nothing is more bad-ass than binary code. James McAvoy? Morgan Freeman? Who wants to see them? Apparently not us.
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