Why go? I wouldn't if I were you.
There are two
ways to watch “Wanted”: laugh or be angry. To be angry at content these days is
to be earnest, and the earnest among us tend to preach. So let’s just say that
movies that imbue killing with glamour are crossing a dangerous line. It’s the
same line that seems to have been crossed by the seventeen pregnant high school
girls in Gloucester, Mass who must have seen “Juno” many times. The power of
suggestion in our contemporary culture is indeed powerful, sometimes lethal.
But “Wanted”
is such a ridiculous movie that it is more appropriate to laugh than to preach.
The slow motion gore lasts from first scene to last. Everyone bleeds at some
point; bullets collide in mid-flight; a train drops with spectacular tension
into a deep canyon; cars fly in a profusion of special effects thrills. The
early scenes are full of horror shocks; at one point I bit the inside of my
cheek in fright, a combat wound of sorts for a movie critic, but as time goes
slowly by, our minds and bodies become thoroughly numbed by the bloody chaos.
Wesley Gibson
(James McAvoy) is a cubicle accountant whose boss is a scurrilous and corpulent
fascist who gnaws on her secret stash of jelly doughnuts. So when Wesley is
kidnapped by the glamorous Fox (Angelina Jolie), it’s a big step up from the
cubicle. Fox takes the hapless accountant to a textile factory where automatic
weaving looms produce intricate fabrics that also contain a binary code that
carries a secret mandate for The Federation, a secret society of assassins with
ancient roots.
The group has
retrieved Wesley, you see, because he has a heartbeat that can rise on special
occasions to a count 400 times that of ordinary humans – all the better to shoot
faster, for instance, when shooting the wings off a fly, his first assignment.
Fox will mold the raw material that is Wesley into the sharp reflexes and amoral
thinking of a successful assassin. The problem here is that although the movie
is based on a comic book series, building a movie on a premise of professional
murder is an unpalatable notion in 2008.
There’s a
small bit of delicious irony in watching Angelina Jolie, our global First Mom,
play a professional assassin who can off anyone who crosses her shadow. Ms.
Jolie has a secret weapon: she loves what she does, and it shows. Her stylish
action moves, especially in contrast to those of her awkward bumpkin partner,
generate appreciative laughter. Mr. McAvoy, a grand movie chameleon, is suitably
astonished at his newfound capabilities as a killer.
It remains
that this is a blood soaked movie about the assassination of foreign and
domestic leaders chosen for death by a secret society that thinks it knows
what’s right for the world. Haven’t we seen enough of this in contemporary
headlines? But there I go, preaching again. Why go? I wouldn’t if I were you.
Copyright (c) Illusion