| Saturday, July 05, 2008 |
| Movies I refused to see: "Wanted" |
A guest blog by Joe
It's a common critical assertion that PULP FICTION has a lot to answer for - glamorizing hit men, wholesale profanity, pop-culture riffing in pace of character development. The third: certainly; it's a straight line from PF to SHREK 2. The second: well, see THE LAST DETAIL or even RESERVOIR DOGS. The first - it's hard to argue that Quentin Tarantino revived the hit man as iconic character, but his hit men were not killing machines with windblown hair. They're people who have jobs and, in the last scene, realize the consequences of that job and its inherent moral vacuum. WANTED cares not a whit for the moral vacuum - it's all about the windblown hair.
WANTED features James McAvoy as the same sad-sack pasty twerp he was in ATONEMENT. His job and boss are terrible, his girlfriend cheats on him, and he has anxiety disorder. Instead of his joining the army, as he did in the earlier film, the army joins him, in the person of Angelina Jolie. She appears while he is picking up a refill for his meds, and fends off an attacker by using a gun that can see around corners. After their fiery escape from the pharmacy, Jolie explains that McAvoy is the son of a recently deceased assassin, one of a select few who eliminate bad, bad folks before they can do more badness. His father's killer is one such bad guy, who continues to pursue them. In the ensuing car chase, Jolie steers a car with her feet while hanging out the window shooting at her pursuer with a shotgun, relaxing her body just in time to prevent being decapitated by a passing bus. Once it becomes clear that the laws of neither physics nor traffic safety will be enforced, the stakes are lowered considerably.
In due time, McAvoy is introduced to the rest of The Fraternity, including the knife specialist (wonder what his comeuppence will be?), the bomb-maker, and overlord Morgan Freeman, who explains that the group has existed for a thousand years and takes its orders from a magical loom. Yes, as in weaving textiles. I suppose that's no stranger than claiming divine inspiration from volcanic gasses or holy tortillas.
30 minutes of McAvoy being toughened up for the job follow, with a focus on bloodletting and pummeling. The movie revels in its violence, with the convenient excuse of a rejuvenating bath that heals all wounds. Thus is the cake is both tasty and always at hand. Finally, he's ready for the big time - his first assignment from the magic loom of fate. He hesitates - after all, how does he know the cloth of destiny knows its business? Jolie sets his mind at ease with a horrific story that would've turned out fine if the assigned killer had done his thread-given duty.
Cue another 30 minutes of death and destruction, edited at a frenetic pace that follows the lead of THE BOURNE SUPREMACY - quick-cutting fights to obscure the lack of stunt work. The killer from the pharmacy continues his pursuit of McAvoy as McAvoy continues his preparation to confront that killer, growing more self-actualized with every murder. When that confrontation comes, the Act 3 twist calls into question all that has gone before, including the very scene that contains the twist. What to believe - the script or one's own memory? Who cares? Certainly not the filmmakers.
It will come as no surprise that the power to kill with impunity, as the Fraternity members seem unencumbered by law enforcement, can indeed corrupt, leading to a showdown back at the homestead. The finale is so daft, both in conception and physics, that one can only laugh ruefully.
It's clear to me that the creaters of this movie have never experienced real violence in any form. Their comfort with murder in a consequence-free environment, and their obvious glee in spilling the blood of not only the main characters, but also innocent bystanders (including a whole train full of people who plunge to their deaths so that the aforementioned Act 3 twist can happen) is depraved. The style is much more important than the substance. When everyone's a bad guy, the audience is left rooting for one murderer over another.
The last line of the movie from the empowered McAvoy is "What the f--- have you done lately?" My answer: wasted two hours on your movie. Fortunately, all I've killed is time. Sadly, its death was completely unwarranted. Even the great Singer Sewing Machine in the sky would agree. |
posted by 125records @ 1:25 PM  |
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| 2 Comments: |
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WANTED is sheer madness. It was so over-the-top from practically the first frame that I quickly gave up trying to fight it with the weapons of logic and morality and simply laughed long and hard at how demented the whole thing was. Perhaps I should have held back, but what the hell -- it was certainly a lot more enjoyable than SAVAGE GRACE, in which poor Julianne Moore plays a dim socialite who floats around Europe in stunning clothes in the 1950s and 1960s, only to lose her husband to her son's girlfriend; then she and her "walker" (a stylish gay escort) and her son all end up in bed together and she starts laughing at the absurdity of it all and you just know, as Boz Scaggs once warned us, there's a breakdown dead ahead. It was so gloomy I would have welcomed a few backwards bullets or tumbling cars or even a prophetic loom. Instead, I got to watch her increasingly unstable son tear apart the kitchen while looking for a long-lost dog collar, shortly after he and his mom had engaged in a bit of frisky fun on the couch. Did I mention this was based on a true story? That made it all doubly depressing. Fox, Fox, where are you, Fox?
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If you love blood, violence, the idea of murder without repercussion, killing strangers for pleasure, and assassinations based on the deciphering of stitches in binary code from a cotton weaving machine, then you'll probably like this film. If you tend to think about underlying plot structures in movies, then you may be tempted to think about the moral compass in Wanted, and the direction the compass is pointing. For me, the compass needle was pointed to the exit sign in the cinema, to which I treaded an hour into the movie. I like James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, and hope to see them in better films, but the sadistic violence in Wanted didn't do anything for me.
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WANTED is sheer madness. It was so over-the-top from practically the first frame that I quickly gave up trying to fight it with the weapons of logic and morality and simply laughed long and hard at how demented the whole thing was. Perhaps I should have held back, but what the hell -- it was certainly a lot more enjoyable than SAVAGE GRACE, in which poor Julianne Moore plays a dim socialite who floats around Europe in stunning clothes in the 1950s and 1960s, only to lose her husband to her son's girlfriend; then she and her "walker" (a stylish gay escort) and her son all end up in bed together and she starts laughing at the absurdity of it all and you just know, as Boz Scaggs once warned us, there's a breakdown dead ahead. It was so gloomy I would have welcomed a few backwards bullets or tumbling cars or even a prophetic loom. Instead, I got to watch her increasingly unstable son tear apart the kitchen while looking for a long-lost dog collar, shortly after he and his mom had engaged in a bit of frisky fun on the couch. Did I mention this was based on a true story? That made it all doubly depressing. Fox, Fox, where are you, Fox?