Rating: 2.5 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
Generic office worker (“Get me those business reports by 3 o’clock!” writes screenwriter who doesn’t know how jobs work) and Fight Club viewer Wesley Gibson is depressed. He hates his boss because she’s mean and fat, he hates his girlfriend because she’s mean and cheats on him, and he gets regular panic attacks because of the unbearable ennui of being a young white male in these fallen times. Then one day an owl — sorry, a fox — sorry, a girl named Fox shows up to tell him that his father was a super-powered assassin, which means Wesley is also a super-powered assassin, and she whisks him away to assassin school to begin his training.
It turns out his father was a member of The Fraternity, a league of assassins who will kill anyone a magic loom tells them to. The loom occasionally misses a stitch, and this reveals a binary code that, when translated, is a person’s name. This has been going on for 1,000 years, which I guess means The Fraternity also invented binary, but it’s not clear why, when they determined the loom was saying people’s names, they then concluded it was the names of people fate wanted them to kill? Seems a leap. Anyways, one of them “went rogue” and killed Wesley’s dad, and now Wesley is the only person who can kill him right back, since he’s got those inherited powers.
Wanted is based on a comic book about a sad sack who finds out his dad was a super villain, in a world where super villains rule all and have killed off the super heroes, and though I haven’t read it, from what I understand it’s very “edgy” and there is absolutely no pretense of making the world a better place or anything like that. I guess I understand why they didn’t want to make a movie about super villains killing, raping, molesting, etc., with absolutely no good guys to stop them, but also why bother adapting this at all? And then change the whole thing to be about a magic loom?
Best Parts:
As dumb as this movie is, and it is dumb, it has a lot of good action scenes and can be entertaining in its own, dumb way.
Bending bullets is silly but fun. Running on trains is silly but fun. Flipping over a car to shoot someone through a sun roof is silly but fun. Running around with your gun stuck inside a guy’s head still shooting people is silly but fun.
I like that Angelina Jolie’s character kills everyone and then herself at the end. That seems like a really messed up sentence to write. But I like that they didn’t try to keep her alive for a sequel or end the movie with her and Wesley making out in a convertible by the beach or something.
Worst Parts:
It is pretty dumb. It’s trying very hard to be Fight Club and The Matrix and even a little American Psycho but doesn’t have the skill to do any of that. The opening narration is godawful.
It’s also very childish and has weird mommy and daddy issues and weird issues with women. Wesley’s father abandoned him when he was a week old, and he later finds out it’s because his dad was a super cool assassin and also by the way loved him and always monitored his life and missed him terribly, meanwhile his work mommy is an overbearing disciplinarian who’s always mad at him for not doing his chores. His girlfriend is a shrill, cheating monster, nothing like Fox, literally the only woman in a “fraternity”, who is essentially one of the bros except she looks like Angelina Jolie and sometimes takes her clothes off in front of you like it’s no big deal. Extensive therapy is needed for the dudes who made this.
These are supposed to be the world’s greatest assassins but they make a huge amount of noise, kill their targets in rooms full of witnesses, and generally make a big display out of everything. I feel like an actual “world’s greatest assassin” would be someone who made it look like an accident or a heart attack or something, yes?
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