The Film Library

Wanted

First off, no, this isn't becoming the comic book film club. I have some none comic related stuff in the works, but I just saw Wanted this past weekend and had a few thoughts. Also, it's the summer movie season, so this is the type of film we're getting. In the fall it'll be different.

I haven't read all of Wanted, but I've read enough of the issues to know that the movie is drastically different, while fundamentally similar. In the comic, the main character learns his recently deceased father was part of the Fraternity, not a league of assassins, but a league of honest to god supervillains. Seems awhile back, the supervillains won the war with the heroes, and rewrote history so that everyone believes superheroes are only the stuff of comic books, leaving the villains to comfortably rule the world from behind the scenes. In movie form, directed by Timur Bakmembatov(director of the similarly insane Nightwatch over in Russia),
Wesley Gibson(James McAvoy) isn't invited into a club of supervillains, but assassins who believe they are saving the world by killing more dangerous victims whose identities are chosen by fate, quite literally. Kill one, save a thousand is their motto.

Now, Wanted is a vile, disgusting, obscene and hateful movie, but it's also awesome as hell. It distills the blockbuster formula down to it's basic equation; stuff blowing up, people getting shot, car chases, and then amps it all up to 11, reveling in the ridiculous unbelievability of it all. McAvoy, Freeman, Jolie, Terrence Stamp, they all do fine work, but this is Bakmembatov's film through and through. If he hadn't pushed those excesses, and embraced every physically impossible stunt while ignoring every logical question(how is it that Freeman knows exactly where to find the names on that huge ass loom? How did the Fraternity miss Hitler?), then the movie would not have worked at all. In the hands of Michael Bay this movie would have been garbage of the highest order, a repellant film pushing repellant ideals.

And yet, because everything is so damn stylish it becomes pointless to worry about anything else. The film retains the big 'F-You, common-folk' attitude from the comic, but it's still fun, and great to see such a visual director get his way in America.