Toss all rationality and logic aside! Here comes Wanted!
Written: Jul 21 '08
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Overall acting, action is exciting
Cons: lacking any kind of substance
The Bottom Line: Wanted is really weird. It is mindless and violent. But since it doesn't pretend otherwise, it's enjoyable to some degree.
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| wrestler's Full Review: Wanted |
Wanted is one violent, ridiculous, preposterous movie. It wastes no time before telling the viewer exactly where it stands. You can feel a Sin City-like intent behind it, although Wanted does not come close to the kind of class and sheer quality that Sin City gave us a few years ago. However, it is a creative movie when it comes to finding more and more improbable ways to destroy stuff and kill people. It is an enjoyable movie if you can move aside logic and rationality and accept the fact that you are watching a video game on the big screen.
James McAvoy stars as Wesley Gibson, an office worker frustrated with his life and the routine that comes with it. He does not go without reminding us of the character played by Ron Livingston in Mike Judge's Office Space (1999). Like the Peter Gibbons character, Wesley's life consists of a boring routine, an insufferable boss and a girlfriend who cheats on him on a nearly constant basis with his slime of a best friend. Wesley describes this in extremely funny fashion.
One day, he goes to pick up his anxiety medicine and he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), who casually tells him that his father was part of a thousand-year old league of assassins called the Fraternity and that he was recently shot on a rooftop. She then tells Wesley that he has been chosen to avenge his father and to kill Cross (Thomas Kretchmann), the man responsible. Then follows the least believable car chase scene in recent memory, featuring Jolie's super fast sport car struggling to lose Cross' lumbering merchandise truck. Note: That is saying something, considering how believable car chase scenes usually are.
After about ten minutes, Wesley (along with the viewers) gets a break to meet Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the Fraternity's big boss, who tells him that his anxiety attacks are not anxiety attacks. They are adrenaline rushes, a time in which everything slows down for Wesley, a gift that warrants membership in the Fraternity.
Initially, this is too much for Wesley to take in. But the next day, he feels rejuvenated, sets the records straight with his boss and his best friend and comes back to Sloan to join into the Fraternity. Among other things, the initiation means getting the hell beaten out of him several times and learning to bend shots when he fires a gun like Roger Federer does with Tennis balls.
He is then shown how the Fraternity picks its targets. Or, as Sloan tells him, fate. Fate, it turns out, tells who to kill through a binary code system hidden inside mass produced cloth. If it seems ridiculous, that's because it is, but don't tell Sloan.
The ways in which the Fraternity kills its targets is also fairly...nuts. Aren't there more effective ways to kill a target than to create a giant pileup in the streets just so you can send your car spinning in the air and shoot the target through the open retractable roof while your car is completely upside down? If you are irritated, beware. The entire movie works like that.
The plot carries an interesting twist, which would be even more interesting if Hollywood tradition and one specific line of the screenplay involving a specific belief didn't give it away fairly quickly.
The performances are good, even though the film lacks the heart to really make them mean anything. McAvoy has shown in movies such as Atonement and The Chronicles of Narnia that he's a really talented actor, but I fear for the path to mediocrity he seems to be taking recently as Hollywood seems to have identified him as a potential member of its new pretty boy generation.
Wanted is a movie that is all about style. There is little substance involved here, nor is there any heart. This is mindless action, for better or worst. There is some Sin City in this movie, which I enjoyed so much back in 2005 and while this film does not come close to the level of greatness of Sin City, some graphic novel elements in Wanted make it a fairly enjoyable experience, logic aside.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Action Movie
Viewing Method: Sneak Preview at My Local Theater
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot
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Epinions.com ID:
wrestler
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Member: Alexandre Turp
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Reviews written: 162
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
Evolution is all that matters.
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