Wanted is a surprise. With a 74% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 3 stars from James Berardinelli, typically a harsh critic of summer popcorn fare, the movie has gained all sorts of support that I never would have precedented after the movie's first half hour.
Put simply, Wall-E deserves every iota of praise and more. Wanted does not. We'll start with the inferior movie.
Wanted has one thing going for it and that's the character of Wesley Gibson BEFORE he becomes an assassin. The most interesting scenes are those that involve Wesley (James McAvoy) suffering Peter Gibbons-esque levels of dissatisfaction with his dead-end cubicle. It's a story that we're all familiar with, but I haven't heard any on-screen persona tell it as directly as McAvoy's character. "There's my best friend ****ing my girlfriend on an IKEA table I recently purchased" he narrates as they vividly demonstrate.
His boss is a creatively profane lardass, said cheating girlfriend is a bitch, and he's essentially taken as a chump by everyone around him. He even gets attitude from an ATM for his laughable assets, in a particularly inspired scene. Gibson's life makes Office Space seem like Disneyworld.
The convenient plot device used to explain Wesley's inevitable messianic importance is his anxiety condition. Whenever stressed, the world begins to pulsate around him, things slow to an agonizing crawl, and sounds become a distorted boom in his head. Wesley medicates to keep himself in Schmucksville.
Enter Fox (Angelina Jolie) and Sloan (Morgan Freeman), who force him to see what he's capable of without pills. When Wesley realizes that he's a star in an action movie, he wreaks havoc in his office, verbally crushing his boss and slamming a keyboard into his "best friend's" face. This is the most inspiring moment in Wanted, evocative of that simple truth Mike Juge presented more realistically in 1999: the American system of career advancement sucks balls.
So, rather than dealing with the truth, Wanted jumps into escapism. And this isn't the issue, since I enjoy vicariously living through main characters that don't have the same responsibilities I do as much as the next guy. My gripe is the particularly uninspired and predictable form this escape took.
Let's get this out of the way: The Fraternity of Assassins receives its orders from a mystical Loom of Fate. You know...a machine that weaves patterns with thread. That's where they get their kill orders. Sorry to spoil it. But you probably should know before you walk in expecting an interesting method to their madness. There is no method. They're just crazy.
For about ten seconds, the movie wrestles with the question of conscience: "What have these people done? Do they deserve to die?" So, Angelina Jolie tells a dark story from her past that makes us feel okay that Wesley is pistol-sniping random white collar white guys. The justification is basically, "Kill one, save a thousand."
Okay...but later, Fox drives a car into a train leading to its derailment and the death of hundreds of innocent civilians. So the real message is, "Mass death is profitable." And yeah, I'll admit it, I feel like I get more bang from my buck durng those over the top scenes. But it doesn't make the movie any more culturally significant than the evening news.
SPOILERS. Eventually you find out that all the chain of events we witnessed were put into motion by Sloan, not the Loom of Fate, so you can rationalize yourself out of the collateral damage argument, if you want. But this just brings up the fact that we all expected a massive backstabbing to happen from minute one. Especially from the black mentor. Way to follow the M. Night formula, Wanted. SPOILERS.
At the descending slope of the film's climax, Wanted attempts to wax philosophical again. Since the assassins are all guilty of cold-blooded murder, aren't they worthy of hits themselves? An interesting question posed, but considering it comes minutes within the film's final brain-breaking bullet and the main character's ultimate choice, its attitude toward morality is best summed up by Common's final line: "Fuck the code."(Yes, I realize I didn't censor before, but I didn't feel like it just now.)
Listen, I'm not a crusader against gratuitous violence in American movies. It's a fact, people get killed and there's a part of us that's fascinated by that. But the good movies are the ones that put that hyperviolence in a thoughtful context. Example: Rambo. Ultimately, much more violent and disturbing than Wanted, but worth more of my time and money. What this movie approaches is something more like masturbation for the id, that evil and vicious part of you that likes to see people's heads explode. Yes, I go "WHOA, nice!, and haha!" at the blood splatter, and Angelina Jolie's ass, and the giddy use of profanity, but ultimately, I haven't really connected with anything eye-opening. I was impressed with the initial rampage involving Mr. X. I hadn't had that much fun watching murder since Shoot 'Em Up. But then it became more of the same.
My research on the comic book tells me it actually didn't deal with the honorable assassin bull and was literally about a society of supervillains. So maybe that was a more interesting exploration of evil. The movie, instead, tries to rationalize the killing and reassure you that you, the viewer, are on the right side. Bore.
I'll end with something positive. Like I said before, Wanted grips you with a direct, no bullshit representation of one man's pitiful life and it makes you root for him, because Wesley Gibson is so damn witty under his doormat exterior. So, yes, there's wit here and there's vision. Wanted hits the right note as the once overly-apologetic Wesley sends a bullet into the double-breasted gut of an Andrea Bocelli. His calling card? "I'm.....sooooooorrrrrrryyyyyy."
Apology accepted, Wanted. You did provide some fun, after all.
I'll save the Wall-E review for later tonight, since I don't fell right combining it with this disappointment and I have stuff to do.
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