Kiss Kiss Lame Lame

[June 25th, 2008]

Every so often, an R-rated special-effects action extravaganza changes the tide of popcorn filmmaking, inspiring hordes of imitators until something slicker comes along. Films like Alien, Die Hard, Terminator 2, and The Matrix all seamlessly meshed innovation with big explosions, ample profanity and story lines for the big kids. Now Wanted has its crosshairs set on becoming the next R-rated smash, mixing humor with explosive slo-mo money shots and grisly slo-mo head shots in an attempt to reinvent the action-movie wheel. It’s a comic-book flick covered in brain matter and glitter, a barrage of set pieces, stunts and thrill-kill sadism. In a summer of Dark Knights and Iron Men, Wanted is a movie version of titular football lameass Rudy. It’s an underdog looking to become a hit, boasting a new-to-Hollywood wunderkind director (Timur Bekmambetov, he of the awesome nonsense Nightwatch) and generating enough buzz to fry every convict in Texas.

And like Rudy, Wanted sucks at what it does—but hey, it gives its all. It’s a bloated mess, swollen with slumming Oscar winners (ever wanted to hear Morgan Freeman say “motherfucker”?) and fat with half-baked innovation. Wanted comes out swinging with a Matrix-meets-the-10th-century set piece that sets the tone for its goofy barbarism. But despite the surreal action numbers—among them a show-stopping train chase and a bullet’s-eye-view rooftop melee—the movie doesn’t know where to go.

It doesn’t help that the story, based on Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’ comics, seems to have been written by a 12-year-old who cut plot points from other flicks and haphazardly pasted them together. You see, there’s an age-old assassin’s guild called “The Fraternity” performing noble executions. They take their orders from a code-spewing sewing machine called “The Loom of Fate” (seriously). They can leap from skyscraper to skyscraper, arch bullets like curveballs and run like antelopes on PCP. This world of killers descends on office drone Wesley (James McAvoy), a watered-down version of Edward Norton from Fight Club. When bullets start whizzing around him, he learns his dead daddy was a Frat boy, and there’s a rogue agent coming after him, meaning his ass needs to go all Hamlet.

Providing training are a series of stock killers (a Mexican with knives, rapper Common specializing in ass-capping) led by Angelina Jolie, whose specialty is bending into Kama Sutra positions and shooting stuff. The former Tomb Raider is effective during Wesley’s torturous trial-and-error reinvention—nobody looks better covered in sweat and blood while firing two guns—but with minimal lines and zero charisma, she seems bored. Ditto for McAvoy, who can’t make tangible the transition from whiny fish out of water to stone-cold killer. But by the time the scrawny Atonement star starts snarling and double-fisting pistols like Chow Yun Fat’s illegitimate son, it’s a hard sell.

Early in the film, during the obligatory “wax on, wax off” training montage that instantly transforms McAvoy from Dudley Dipshit to Carlos the Jackal, it becomes clear that Wanted is polishing a turd, and polishing it well. The flick is innovative in its action sequences, that intersperse bullet-time operatics with the brutality of early John Woo. But with all the craziness, Wanted rests all its creativity in the action and fails to enrich characters we couldn’t give a shit about and a Frankensteined plot full of obvious twists. If it hadn’t bothered with story at all it wouldn’t be an issue. But the movie spends a lot of half-hearted time under-developing its cookie-cutter characters when we just want to see them look sexy and kill each other.

Still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the execution(s), and for those who like to mix low brain-cell counts with high body counts, Wanted is a contender for Best Movie, Like, Ever. For the rest of us, it plays like a brand-X version of other, better action flicks, and while it’s loud and shiny, it isn’t likely to change many perspectives.