Review: Wanted (2008)

[Scott Mendelson]

Wanted
2008
110 minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and
some sexuality.

by Scott Mendelson

During Tim Burton's 1994 biopic, Ed Wood, Johnny Depp places a phone
call to a financier who has just screened Wood's first major motion
picture. "Really," Wood inquires, "worst movie you've ever seen? Oh...
well, the next one will be better!"

Timur Bekmambetov previously directed Nightwatch, which is one of the
worst films of the last five years. Intended as a Russian version of
the sci-fi punk genre popularized in The Matrix, Blade, or The
Terminator, it was an incomprehensible mess of 'cool' that I called
"the worst thing to happen to Russia since the North Ossetia school
massacre of September 2004." Having missed the sequel, Day Watch, I
was morbidly curious about what this visual dry-heave and narrative
wet-fart would do with a major American action picture. Well, at least
this film was comprehensible. So that's progress. I guess.

Paraphrasing a friend of mine as we exited the theater, Wanted is a
movie so shamelessly derivative of so many other movies that it ought
to have a work-cited page at the start of the closing credits. It
steals and copies and dumbs down countless action classics of the last
twenty-five years. It swipes from, among many others, The Matrix,
Fight Club, The Terminator, and Ronin, libeling each and every one of
them by their inclusion. It has the sensibility of an over stimulated
eight-year old boy who still fears the unexplained phenomenon known as
girls. Wanted is the most willfully stupid and condescending action
films in years.

The 'plot': Take The Matrix. Substitute James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie,
and Morgan Freeman for Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence
Fishburne. Ok, now substitute 'Wesley, Fox, and Sloane' for Neo,
Trinity, and Morpheus. Now switch out 'Fraternity' for 'rebellion' and
switch out 'war against the machines' and 'great hope' and toss in
'master assassin' and 'quest to kill various targets that allegedly
threaten society'. That was easy.

While The Matrix and Fight Club was occasionally subtle and always
smart in dealing with the generational angst of males growing up
without any real manly purpose in a slightly more feminized world
(gross simplification, my apologies), Wanted is literally filled end-
to-end with over-the-top and on-the-nose voice over from McAvoy in
which every plot point is explained, every emotional beat is repeated
thrice, and every character choice is explained and diagrammed for
audience consumption. Seriously, this narration is worse than Blade
Runner and worse than Sin City. This is literally the worst voice over
I have ever heard in any movie... ever.

McAvoy is hilariously miscast as Wesley Gibson. While he is adequate
as the put-upon loser in the opening acts (even there, he talks and
whines constantly during the action scenes), he is ridiculously
unconvincing once he allegedly becomes the master assassin who will
prove the savior of 'The Fraternity'. For most of the picture, Wesley
Gibson inexplicably is obsessed with avenging the murder of his
father, despite the fact that daddy abandoned him when he was seven-
days old. At all times, McAvoy resembles your whiny little brother and
really, who wants to see their whiny little brother become an expert
killer in a super-secret society?
Much of the movie's advertising campaign has focused on the appeal of
Angelina Jolie playing a vixen-ish assassin who engages in various
forms of action set-pieces. But don't be fooled. Jolie's Fox gets one
major action scene at the beginning of the film, but she quickly
becomes eye-candy background scenery. The rest of the action either
doesn't involve Fox or has her passively observing the manly work of
killing.

For Timur Bekmambetov, women are scary, devious creatures who should
not be trusted. Wesley's current girlfriend is an abusive, trashy slut
who sleeps around with his best friend. Wesley's boss is a boorish and
vile woman, both because she is in a position of power and because she
is grossly overweight. Even the seemingly super-woman Fox eventually
finds herself regulated to being the token female in the all-boys
killers club.

The much-buzzed about action has no sense of physics or suspense,
rendering it boring. Morgan Freeman has but a few lines of notable
dialogue and not a single action scene. The film is quite bloody and
violent, but there is no weight or consequence to the violence. There
is literally a scene where Wesley's reckless and vengeful actions
single-handedly cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent bystanders
(this carnage caused by an allegedly covert and top-secret society
goes unmentioned and unnoticed).

We have horribly stupid writing, astonishingly insulting expositional
voice over, mediocre acting, wasted talent, head-slappingly stupid
action, and a sensibility that caters to pre-adolescent boys who still
fear cooties. Yep, Wanted is the best film that Timur Bekmambetov has
yet made. Good for him. Really.

Grade: D+