Yeah I didn’t like it that much.
I went in expecting a brainless action film, and twenty minutes into it, I was disappointed that WANTED met my expectations. I wanted WANTED to be a better movie. By the climax of the movie, the story becomes pointless when you question its logic or religious symbolism. By the end, I realized the movie is chock-full of action scenes, but a generally ridiculous, although entertaining, package of visual stimuli.
Based on a graphic novel (a.k.a. comic book) by James Millar, the story follows Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a bitter, broke office drone completely dissatisfied with his less-than-mediocre life. His day-to-day routine is spiced with frequent panic attacks, an obnoxious foul-mouthed office boss, and a live-in girlfriend who is sleeping with his co-worker and best friend (”best” implies some sort of good relationship, but this guy is a total jerk!).
Almost nothing seems to stand between Wesley and suicide until one night on a mission to score some more panic-attack medication he meets Fox (as in “crazy like an Angelina Jolie”), a tatted, wife-beater-wearing killer with a big gun and too much eye shadow. Jolie seems to like this type of more-fatale-than-femme character, the untouchable sexpot-with-a-gun. Seriously, the role of Fox doesn’t require much from her other than a bit of brawling, standing and glaring at things, occasionally with a finger in her mouth, and spouting terrible dialogue.
Part of that dialogue includes telling Wesley that his father was recently murdered by a fellow assassin and rogue member of The Fraternity, a thousand-year-old religious cult of assassins who take their orders directly from fate through a loom, interpreted by their leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Wesley was apparently born with mad assassin skills and Fox recruits him.
So Wesley gets to break out of his shell and take control of his life, releasing his inner killer with the help of The Fraternity’s brutal training. He too begins carrying out the orders given by the loom of fate, eager to find the man who killed his father and betrayed the brethren
Wesley’s transformation is a bit extreme – from a passive push-over to a vengeful assassin. We’re supposed to believe that the knack for skilled murder has been inside him all along. I suppose it’s believable since from the beginning of the film, McAvoy convincingly plays Wesley with a seething, inner rage that causes the panic attacks when confronted with a maniacal boss or backstabbing best friend. Wesley just needed The Fraternity to come and set him free.
And this is where the not-so-subtle religious subtext comes in. Allow me to make some connections: The Fraternity (the church) is led by the prophet-like Sloan (Jesus), who sends the assassins (the 12 disciples) out into the world to carry out fate’s (God’s) orders found in the secret code of the loom (a sort of Scripture). Sloan even mentions to Wesley that the assassins are like apostles spreading their gospel.
Why do they kill people, you ask? Well, simply because the loom tells them to, silly. To be fair, though, there is a brief and emotional reasoning behind the no-questions-asked approach to all the killing. Because of a tragic event in Fox’s past, she has learned that what she is doing is actually keeping balance to the world, and Wesley must unquestioningly follow suit.
It’s hard to believe because you would think that fate or the loom would be commissioning the assassins to rid the world of the countless of criminals on the streets, rather than taking out random, high-profile targets in ridiculously complicated, acrobatic assassinations. Why must the assassins shoot a guy from atop a speeding train and bend bend the bullet’s trajectory? Oh wait, no questions, I forgot.
If you check your brain at the door – something I advise against since it only encourages the big studios to continue making seizure-inducing movies with weak and/or morally bankrupt stories – you can unquestioningly enjoy the high-intensity car chases, impossibly brutal fight scenes, the flying bullets with minds of their own, and a few unnecessary action scenes of slo-mo coolness. Because the film has been promoted since Fall last year and I’ve seen the trailers so many times, some of the better action scenes were not as fun when I finally saw them within the context of the film. But nonetheless, there are enough thrills to keep you watching.
Even still, to me at least, the most intriguing element of WANTED is the interesting pseudo-commentary on religion and its followers. Whether it was intended or not, the end result looks like an inverted gospel with the traitor as savior, exposing lies and hypocrisy. And that’s probably giving it too much credit.
As the story wraps up, you find that there isn’t any good news for anyone, no salvation, no real justice. Wesley decides to fulfill the movie’s tagline and choose his own destiny. A destiny that is built upon the acceptance (and then denial) of the apparent truth of fate’s whims and the word of the loom, but Wesley is in complete control. So there is a sadness among the carpe diem message where he triumphantly and vengefully chooses a way that seems right to him, as a line from an old Proverb says. WANTED forgets the second half: “but its end is the way that leads to death.”
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