I recently saw the acclaimed film Wanted. What can I say? What should I say? Is it better than the latest Bond feature? Uhm…this is a tough one since the two are completely different genres, but I must say that the two come close in being the crappiest action flicks of the late 2008.
Wanted is directed by the visionary Timur Bekmambetov (yeah…try pronouncing that name) who has brought us the vampire fantasy flicks Night Watch and Day Watch, and put Russian film-making back on the map. So I must give him and his team a lot of credit for finally making it to Hollywood.
Plot: a frustrated office worker (James McAvoy) is approached by a mysterious woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) only to learn that he is the son of a late assassin who worked for a thousand-year-old secret society of professional hitmen known as the Fraternity…
* * * WARNING: mild spoilers ahead * * *
Wanted is filled with lots of graphic violence, decent action, and really good CGI, but the plot is very predictable and quite bad. Especially the concept of using a loom and a binary code in determining the Fraternity’s targets – I could not believe that the protagonist Wesley actually fell for this kind of absurdity. In case if you didn’t know -- the binary numeral system was not invented up until the 17th century, so how could the Fraternity have used it for over a thousand years? And how on earth did they know that the person’s names “spelled out” by the code must be assassinated? I think I’ll rest my case here. The acting on behalf of James McAvoy is okay, but Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman perform a bit below average. Almost as if they were cast only to gain more publicity for the film. Morgan's "Shoot that motherfucker!" line almost made me cringe. After all, he is Morgan Freeman, not Samuel L. Jackson!
* * (two out of five) – mildly entertaining, but the moment you start analyzing the concept of the loom and the binary code you’d probably want to turn it off. I’ll add another star here just for the international breakthrough of Timur and his team of visionary film-makers.
V.
Enjoyed Wanted? Viira recommends: Night Watch, Day Watch, and the Matrix trilogy.
Poster courtesy of http://www.impawards.com/
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