This is me reviewing the filmic revamp of “Wanted”.
Readers of the original Wanted — a six-issue 2003-2004 Top Cow miniseries now available in trade paperback or hardcover — have spent months suspecting the film version would be DOA solely because the major characters’ profession has been changed from super-villain to assassin. Movie critics unfamiliar with the source material have labeled it “unintelligible” and “preposterous”, fair adjectives to apply to a movie where the characters exhibit superhuman powers yet are denied use of the word “super” — possibly out of fear of marketing confusion, or perhaps fear of dismissal as Just Another Super-Hero Movie.
Our protagonist, office drone Wesley Gibson, begins in the same place in both versions — as a lazy coward too unaware to leave his excruciating rut of an existence filled with meaningless routine and antagonistic stock characters. Whereas the comic version came of as a whiny and spoiled Eminem doppelgänger, James McAvoy plays him initially as a twitching nervous wreck who falls apart at the merest hint of confrontation, whose jowls quiver and ripple like bedsheets on a windswept clothesline whenever he’s exposed to discomfort.
His life is turned upside-down when he meets a femme fatale named Fox, who informs him Everything He Knows Is Wrong, that his long-lost father was someone of great import and talent who’s now died and bequeathed both to his ignorant son. The original Fox was African-American and cursed with dialogue that read like a middle-class white man’s idea of how rap video dancers might talk. In a role that feels underwritten but technically isn’t, Angelina Jolie has fewer lines than some of the supporting cast, but exudes such confidence and complexity through mere facial gestures, posture, and impressive stuntwork that adding spoken words to her scenes would be redundant, if not obstructive.
Fox drags Wesley flailing and screaming into his first shootout and car chase, then introduces him to the requisite mentor character. From here the dichotomy between the comic and the movie begins to widen, as the Luthor-analog that was The Professor is replaced by good ol’ Morgan Freeman as Sloan, another of the standard authority-figure roles he plays in every movie in which he’s not top-billed. Sloan is the head of the Fraternity, a self-described “league of assassins” (not to be confused with Ra’s al-Ghul’s League of Assassins) whose bland name sounds like any number of 21st-century super-hero teams but whose mission statement is to take kill-orders from a magical loom (more dignified than a Ouija board, I suppose) that foresees the names of evildoers before their deeds can be committed. They’re a tight-knit team of self-justified Punishers by way of the Minority Report Department of Pre-Crime.
(In the comic, The Professor was the head of one of several super-villain families that have ruled Earth for decades after all the superheroes were eliminated altogether. Wesley’s character arc peaked early in a gleeful power trip free of consequence as he uses his newfound immoral empowerment to steal, rape, and kill to his heart’s content, only to be later embroiled in a pointless turf war with other vindictive super-villains. Whether mainstream moviegoers are ready for a protagonist so utterly drained of conscience is debatable; I uncharitably imagine that some of the reading audience may have identified too readily with Wesley in a perverse form of wish fulfillment.)
In both versions, Wesley must first endure a medley of torture, fight lessons, and weapons training — firsthand from both ends — before he can leave the simple life behind and adapt to their predatory mindset. His teachers impart upon him the unexplained talent of “curving” bullet paths — altering their trajectory through effortless force of will so that every shot is a bullseye, just like Dirty Harry. Yet looming (so to speak) over all of this is the specter of his father’s murder and the unanswered questions that Wesley doesn’t know to ask until they’re thrust in his face.
Whereas the comic entered from the viewpoint of “immoral = good” yet persisted in toeing the well-worn line of honor among thieves, the movie blithely sidesteps the morality issue — since the targets ostensibly are or will be evil, then the killers are more like vigilantes, so that’s, like, totally okay! Instead the thematic focus here is the eternal debate between free will and determinism. The Fraternity brothers hold greater gifts than the average Joe and thereby enjoy a sort of liberation in their own minds, but if the loom sees all and knows best, how obliged are they to obey? What price autonomy?
Wanted supports its thesis just as the The Matrix made its case for the superiority of the individual over the brainwashed collective — by communicating its arguments through a series of expensive slow-motion action scenes guaranteed to satisfy any young male who hasn’t already overdosed, and who may be too occupied to notice he’s sitting in a subversive philosophy class punctuated by bursts of mayhem and guts. Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov (anathema to spellcheckers) is far from alone in pilfering from the Wachowski Brothers’ slo-mo whirligig-FX toolbox, but he and his three screenwriters have at the very least envisioned numerous sequences wilder than anything in the comic. The trailers spoil several of them, but a few scenes are more exhilarating at full length, while a select few were held back from the trailers. Witness the use of a bus as a launchpad, the man who brings a knife to a gunfight, the limousine with an Achilles’ heel, and possibly the most dynamic old-fashioned train-crash-over-a-watery-chasm we’ve seen in ages.
All pretense of insight is naturally placed on hold during much of the climactic free-for-all in the Fraternity house, where questions abound above and beyond anything justifiable by the defense of “It’s superheroes!” Where does Our Hero obtain the staggering amount of custom-handcrafted supplies needed for phase one of his master plan? How long did it take him to figure out how to work all the mechanisms on his stolen vehicle? At what point did several characters forget how to curve their ammo? If special effects can turn McAvoy into Rambo, how long until someone in Hollywood brings us a dead serious Ultimate Mr. Bean? And yet…all of that is wiped away by the faith and dedication implied by a single heartfelt bullet.
Neither version of Wanted is satisfied enough with itself to end merely with Our Hero triumphing over those in the immediate vicinity. Rather, each is bookended with a Final Thought to call its own, each challenging the consumer to apply about what they’ve just experienced. One knows that it’s flat-out obnoxius and doesn’t care what you think; the other imagines itself brazen and invites your rebuttal.
Comparing them would be simpler and more thorough if I just ruined them, but I won’t. It’s not that I’m sparing you the spoilers. I’m just reveling in having opted to experience them both for myself on my own terms, through my own filters and no one else’s, and as timely a manner as possible for a guy who doesn’t have any press credentials to access advance screenings. I didn’t wait for the DVD, or mark my calendar for the censored broadcast premiere, or let WikiPedia spoon-feed me the Cliffs Notes version. Richard Roeper and any number of basic-cable bobbleheads didn’t decide my weekend plans for me.
And now I’m mulling it over in a public arena that’s permissible by a benevolent nation’s laws, using website access that’s a generous privilege, constructed with talents that were an unqualified blessing, and backed by bizarre yet fearless inspiration to ramrod content onto your monitor that wasn’t churned out over a lunch break, wasn’t truncated by self-imposed attention deficit, and wasn’t impotently cribbed from another superior website. I enjoy seeing and interpreting movies that are New even while countless others deify the Old and stalk the Unfinished.
These are my activities defying your inactivity.
And this is my homage flying over your head.
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