Remember when Fight Club came out, and a bunch of cubicle morons who hate their job missed the point completely and started their own fight clubs? They were sad men who thought that a violent release of testosterone would save them from being the lifeless drone that they are. Lucky for them, here’s a zero-to-hero story that seems designed as a gift just for them.
Wanted, the movie, is a very loose adaptation of the comic book by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. When I say “loose,” I mean “barely at all.” In fact, aside from one or two memorable scenes from the comic, pretty much the only other element still remaining is the character names. So different are the two versions that the MPAA gave story credit to screenwriters Derek Haas and Michael Brandt (2 Fast 2 Furious) and not Mark Millar.
The comic, about a helpless nobody named Wesley Gibson who discovers that the father he never knew was the greatest supervillain who ever lived, was a crude and explicit book, full of juvenile fantasies about sex, money and power. It was the ultimate 13-year-old boy’s fantasy wank: get a superpower, be a villain, do whatever the f-ck you please. Become wanted, in more ways than one. It has its place, but that’s really all there is to it.
What the film lifts from the book—and they do so successfully—is that nasty devil-may-care attitude, pre-packaged in Hollywood film form. Here, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) still starts out as the depressed dweeb licking the boot-heels of his boss while his best friend porks his irritating girlfriend. His world changes when a mysterious woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) inducts him into The Fraternity, here a cadre of noble assassins who can bend bullet trajectories, helmed by wise old Sloan (Morgan Freeman). After discovering his powers and undergoing intense training, Wesley is suddenly the mofo to end all mofos—curving bullets, fighting dirty and hitting targets with dead-on accuracy and speed. The same boyish fantasy is still there, but instead of dreaming of becoming Dr. Doom, you dream of Neo.
The premise has to do with a universal binary code hidden in textile, written by Fate, that spells out the name of someone bad The Fraternity must then track down and kill in order to “save a thousand.” They’ve been doing this for hundreds of years, apparently. Immediate questions? Who was the nutjob who first looked at a cloth really closely and decided that they could be hit orders? They could’ve made an equally compelling movie just showing the Craigslist hunt for the first batch of The Fraternity... WANTED: Killer willing to take orders from company sweater. Must keep open mind. Bullet curving skills preferred. The film never bothered to further explain much of the things mentioned in the story (like what do you do when there are two people with the same name), so they’re really just givens. I doubt the writers even bothered to answer those questions. “Hey, so we should have this dude turn on Wesley… Why? I don’t know, just say profits. Nobody would care.” They’re right. I certainly didn’t, nor do I care much for this movie.
To its credit, Wanted packs a wallop of insane gunfights, mostly tailored to look as unrealistic as possible. Forget curving bullets; this movie has Wesley deliberately flipping his car upside down over a moving car just to shoot a guy through the sunroof. It’s Shoot ‘Em Up without the deliberate humor. Obviously, when you have ludicrous sequences like this, you tend to be a little tongue-in-cheek automatically, but while Shoot ‘Em Up’s goal was to look as silly as possible while providing some fun bloodbath entertainment, Wanted maintains a deadpan seriousness even when it has two guys shooting at each other’s bullets in mid-air. Had it been more accepting of the lighter side it shows plenty in the first act, or perhaps toy with gross-out exploitation the way the comic did, it could’ve been a ballsy fun distraction and not this macho equivalent of Charlie’s Angels.
Perhaps the defining moment in Wanted is when Wesley turns to the camera and, noting how awesome he is compared to his previous life, asks the audience “What the f-ck have you done lately?” Makes you want to go and beat up that guy at school you never liked, doesn’t it? Makes you want to bump chests with a shirtless guy at work and flip off your boss. It’s the same kind of superficial manly posturing that plagued the likes of 300. What’s that one line from Shoot ‘Em Up? “A pussy can become a man, if he has a gun in his hand”? Somehow, someone made a movie based entirely on that rhetoric.
"Wanted" opens June 27, 2008 and is rated R. Action, Comic Book. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Written by Michael Brandt, Chris Morgan, Derek Haas, Mark Millar. Starring Angelina Jolie, Common, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, James McAvoy, Thomas Kretschmann.
