2 reviews

Directed by the guy who did "Night Watch", which shows up in the secret society hokum and cheerful disregard for innocent bystanders. Clearly he has at some point seen "Fight Club" and thought to himself "You know, we could do this with guns. Lots and lots of guns. And car stunts. And Angelina Jolie."
As it turns out, he was right.

Tim 26 Jun 2008

Recent Hollywood wisdom is that nobody cares about the 'war on terror'. This would seem to be true - Lions for Lambs, Rendition and In the Valley of Elah each underperformed against estimates and Redacted never had a hope of spinning gold anyway. This weekend, however, I think Wanted is set to break the pattern and rake in some dirty cash. Of course, I don't know what percentage of the viewing audience will connect this film to the 'war on terror', which is, I admit, half of my argument for its success - the other half, of course, being that it seems to justify the 'war'.

The Last King of Scotland's Mr. Ann Marie Duff, James McAvoy, stars in Wanted as little Wesley Gibson, your standard issue wish-fulfilment power-fantasy office nerd. Or that's how he begins the film, unaware of his true right to power and unwilling to stand up to his cruel boss, cheating girlfriend or the supposed best friend she is cheating with. After the intervention of a superpowered Angelina Jolie, Gibson is shown his true potential as a fine-tuned, over-clocked killing machine - not every young boy's dream come true, but eminently marketable. As the veils are lifted, the audience learn with Wesley the true way of his world. It seems that a venerable and long standing guild of weavers have become the protectors of destiny, murdering targets identified in binary-coded messages from the fabric created on their Loom of Fate. What's more, it seems that Wesley's father was the greatest assassin in Fate's service and now, genes being as dependable as this mystic loom,
Wesley is to take his place. These weavers practice a Kill One, Save One Thousand creed. To my ear that sounds suspiciously like a justification for all manner of nastiness but decide for yourself where you lie on that moral issue - is killing one to save a thousand justified? Do you still think so if that one is you? Or a loved one?

Wesley discovers that somebody - and somebody eminently guessable - has been interfering with Fate's assassination instructions to their benefit (which only seems to render the term Fate inaccurate - a last course Just Desserts puts that thread back in place).  This is where the film is most objectionable however. Wesley fights corruption, and foul corruption - but the fatalist-come-determinist nonsense he believes in is similarly abhorrent. He's not much of a hero in any terms I understand - indeed, the very closing moments feature his direct address to the camera, inciting the audience to follow down his corpse-strewn path. Shudder.

Well, okay then. On the plus side, the film is intermittently spectacular. For every bad idea or
broken visual mechanic there's another one that works brilliantly. Short bursts of the action are stunning, inventive and truly cinematic. So much so, in fact, that I'd even come close to recommending the film. I mean, we're all grown ups here. Surely we can enjoy the sound and fury and simply let the whiffy subtext plop unwanted to the floor? Isn't this a choice we have to make regularly when we go to the cinema?

Brendon Connelly 24 Jun 2008