Wanted

dir: Timur Bekmambetov
[img_assist|nid=35|title=Guns, guns and more guns. And Meat!|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=470|height=312]
Trash. Not mindless trash, but trash all the same. And it’s trash you’ve already seen, as long as you’ve seen The Matrix. Even with a completely different setting and premise, it is so reminiscent of The Matrix that you keep expecting Agents to turn up and Kanooie to appear mouthing “Whoa!” in that supremely affectless way of his.

It’s not just the fact that the supposed hero of the piece, Wesley (James McAvoy), starts off as a depressed office drone who finds out that he’s actually a gifted superhero type, and thus goes from zero to hero in record time. The entire special effects package seems to be solely aimed at insulting the laws of gravity and making entities such as Sir Isaac Newton spin in their graves in a fashion wholly contrary to the physical universe as we know it.

Taking a gratuitous leaf out of The Matrix’s script, the intro begins the film’s descent into cinematic cliché and carnage by having a normal seeming guy do some completely impossible shit involving killing a bunch of guys at a great distance and jumping from one skyscraper to a distant other. Before he is almost mystically killed with a bullet that curves through space and possibly time.

There’s no indication why such and such is occurring, so that’s meant to pique our interest. By now, really, ‘we’, as in cinemagoers, have seen enough movie intros to know that it’s either the fact that a) they’re in a computer program, b) they’re vampires, c) they’re aliens, d) they’re robots, or e) they’re mutants. Or maybe it’s the power of Jesus.

Cue the entrance of an insignificant young guy dying under the crushing weight of his own pointlessness. Wesley (McAvoy) is a low-paid cubicle farm wage slave with hideous co-workers and even more hideous supervisors. He is the stand-in for us. He hates his life and suffers continuously from what he thinks are anxiety attacks.

Next thing he knows, he is swept up by an attractively heroin-chic gun-tottin’ gal covered in tattoos called Fox (Angelina Jolie) who tells him that the man pursuing them through a convenience store and afterwards in a delivery truck is the man who killed his father, being the guy we saw assassinated in the film’s opening.

Next thing Wesley knows, he’s whisked away to a textile factory run by The Fraternity, which in turn is run by a guy called Sloan (Morgan Freeman, delightfully slumming). The Fraternity are, um, a fraternity of assassins who have assassinated people using their almost magical abilities throughout the ages. They can curve bullets, run really fast and basically do Matrix-type stunts because, um, they can.

Wesley is shown that he, too, possesses these almost magical abilities, as did his father. He is informed, in between the most gratuitous and stupid training montage sequences I’ve ever seen, that he must kill his father’s killer, Cross (Thomas Kretschmann)

Through this entire time, and this is regarding an actor I’ve thought was pretty decent, Wesley is the most annoying character I’ve seen in an action film in years. All characters going from hero-to-zero are supposed to be weak and irritating at first (until they come into their own, so to speak), but Wesley is pretty annoying from beginning to end. I don’t think it’s the actor’s fault. After all, this film has one of the most amazingly retarded scripts I’ve ever even heard of.

There are moments in this flick where I could not believe Morgan Freeman was able to keep a straight face with some of the dialogue he was mouthing. Or that anyone else was able to, either. Jolie comes out of this okay because she doesn’t really have to say much: all she has to do is look sexy and murderous, and she can probably manage that in her sleep.

As far as plot devices go, this film has the doozy to trump all other doozies. The Fraternity, in selecting who needs to be assassinated in order to maintain a balance within society, receives its orders from a loom. A fucking LOOM! That randomly spits out names in a binary code when it is such-and-such’s time to die! Sure, I’m well read enough to know about the Greek myth regarding the Fates and their lengths of twine governing the lives of mortals. But this is a fucking LOOM!

Don’t even get me started on how much more ridiculous it all gets. Director Timur Bekmambetov is famous for two main things (even if you’ve never heard of him): he is the only person legitimately from Kazakhstan that you’ve ever heard of, and he made some Russian fantasy films which are the top grossing films in Russian history: being Night Watch and Day Watch.

I’ve seen both of those films, and reviewed them, and I have to say, for all their flash and style, they are essentially retarded flicks with nonsensical scripts that I don’t think could make sense to anyone not drunk on the worst kind of vodka.

Here they’ve given Bekmambetov probably twenty times the budget and ‘big’ Hollywood stars to make a style-abundant, substance-free flick that he could have only dreamed of back in the day when he and Borat were kicking around the head of a gypsy in lieu of a soccer ball back in their hovel of a Kazakh village.

This is a better film from a technical and violence perspective, and it has a multitude of amazing action scenes. It’s a complete dead loss in any other meaningful way. Character-wise, acting-wise, thematic-wise, intelligence-wise, there is barely anything going on here. This flick has lots of adrenalin and muscle, but precious little brains.

That’s not a problem for me, because I still found it enjoyable. It’s a lark. It’s a violent, absurd, preposterous lark and is no less enjoyable because of how profoundly idiotic the script, the plot devices and the eventual resolution are.

The flick does have, against all reason and logic, the pretentiousness to pretend that it’s really about people seizing control of their lives and making something of themselves in order to exceed the meagre expectations of others or one’s self. Part of the training montage sequence involves a guy called The Repairman (Marc Warren) strapping Wesley to a chair and beating him half to death daily in order to ‘repair a lifetime of bad habits”. How exactly this is supposed to train Wesley or improve his magical bullet-bending abilities is never even hinted at, apart from on the generic “pain is the best teacher” kind of level.

Despite its attempt to appeal on the almost Fight Club level to people casting off the strictures of civilisation in order to find the ‘real’ person living and breathing underneath all the baggage, it’s impossible to take any of this crap seriously. Very few people on this planet, I would say, ever find personal liberation or transcendence by becoming assassins, except perhaps for that Austrian girl who escaped from her father’s basement after decades of captivity and torment. She could probably climb out of her dark place and embrace the light by violently murdering her father in the most hideous way possible. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to go well for most people.

This flick is, truth be told, almost too insulting to the intellect and to common sense to take seriously. But then there is a place for absurdity in this art form. You could argue that it belongs in this art form, is wedded to it in a marriage of anything but convenience. Absurd as it may be, it doesn’t pretend it’s that profound or as ‘important’ as the metaphysical / phenomenological / gastrointestinal crapshoot that the Matrix trilogy ended up being. It’s stupid fun, for all its pretensions, and belongs comfortably in the pigeonhole I reserve for the new breed of mindless action flicks that are all balls and speed with no brains (they usually star Jason Statham, just for your information, and seem to be written and filmed by people ODing on energy drinks).

Still, the ending makes no sense, and makes no sense to the point that makes you feel disgusted with yourself for having spent 110 or so minutes watching such a wasteful thing. It becomes almost forgivable considering the fact that Freeman utters a line of dialogue so hilarious that I have to quote it after the end of the review. It made my jaw drop that he could do so without breaking into embarrassed laughter.

But how one bullet not involved in the Kennedy assassination could do what it does at the end of this flick doesn’t even make sense in relation to all the crazy shit these characters can do. One should not care, though. Just be glad it’s over, and then ask yourself, as the film asserts at its end, What the Fuck Did You Do Today?

5 times I’ve seen episodes of Dora the Explorer that had more respect for logic, human decency and common sense than this film out of 10

--
“Shoot this motherfucker and let us take our Fraternity of assassins to heights reserved only for the gods of men!” – Wanted.

Rating: