Wanted: Dead? Or Alive?
Dull guy goes nutzoid
By Andy Klein
When Night Watch (Russia’s Foreign Language Oscar entry a few years back) and its sequel, Day Watch, were released here in 2006 and 2007, it was pretty clear that director Timur Bekmambetov was either trying to kick-start a Hollywood-like film industry in his native land or get himself work in America ... or both. Like Luc Besson with La Femme Nikita, Bekmambetov was sneaking something almost indistinguishable from commercial Hollywood product into American art houses.
So it’s no big surprise that he’s now made Wanted, a big smash-’em-up studio action film, whose main differences from his earlier work are star power (Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman), language (English), and budget (16 times the cost of Night Watch, in a conservative estimate). Wanted is based on a series of comic books, but it shares so many plot elements with the Watch films that it fits Bekmambetov like a red-and-blue costume fits Superman.
Our hero is Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a desk jockey so nondescript that his name doesn’t even get any Google hits. (Apparently he’s such a vacuum that he’s sucked all references to the numerous other Wesley Gibsons right out of the Web.) He’s a doormat to his oppressive boss and to his girlfriend, who happens to be sleeping with his best friend. To top things off, he reacts to stress with extreme panic attacks that make him appear to be having a seizure.
It turns out that this affliction is actually a misunderstood mark of his power. That is, his pulse is going up to 400 and his body is perfectly capable of handling it, if he can only learn how to control his reaction. And that means he can speed up in relation to his environment.
In short, he’s Neo, but in the real world.
He learns all this when he is rescued from an assassin by Fox (Jolie) and whisked away to the lair of the Fraternity, an ancient society of superduper assassins, who are also – I’m not making this up – weavers. Weavers? I can imagine killer smithies or masons, but weavers?
They are not only weavers; they are nutbags. As explained by Sloan (Freeman), Fate sends them messages encoded in the form of flaws in the cloth produced on the Loom of Fate. These messages are in binary code that corresponds to English and are interpreted by Sloan, who is the chief fruitcake of the Loom. Fate – who really sounds a whole lot like God in this system – is letting them know who to kill in order to save others in the future.
So: messages to kill ... from God! Sounds warped, just like Son of Sam and his dog! But their warp is worse than Son of Sam’s woof, whose bark was worse than –
Sorry. I’ll stop now.
As Wesley is trained to become a super-killer, he learns that he must rub out the traitor Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), who murdered his father. This father/son stuff was at the heart of the Watch movies as well, though the arc here is a bit more like Star Wars.
Of course, plot and plausibility are not the central attractions in this genre, which rarely holds either in high regard. The question is: How are the action scenes? Is it exciting?
Well, yeah, in a kind of assaultive way. As is the current trend, the action is close to nonstop and cranked up to eleven, though not as exhausting as Crank, which took the adrenaline-rush idea to what I hope was the ultimate extreme. It uses the full arsenal of post-Matrix effects and concepts, upping that seminal film’s bullet tricks with (literally) a twist – the notion that you can put english on a bullet and make it curve around intervening objects on the way to its target. Pretty cute.
Whether you find the whole thing thrilling or exhausting will depend in large part on the health of your adrenal glands.
Wanted. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan; story by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas; based on the series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. With James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, and Common. Opens Friday citywide.
Published: 06/25/2008
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good review. funny!!
i like funny.