Wanted: Class.
Wanted mates Fight Club’s masculine, angst-marinated cubicle cuckold with the pseudo-mysticism of the domesticated oracle of the Matrix. The “oracle” happens to be a Golden Loom (patent pending?) with an under glow that may impress some import tuners. That’s right, a golden loom. I’m not making it up. In the case of racing, an LED lit chassis must somehow increase horsepower, and in movies it increases the mystique of the mundane.
Anyway, this Loom communicates targets via binary. Gee, a Golden Typewriter sure would be a lot easier. If a hit were to be put on Perez Hilton, the loom with have to spit out:
0101000001100101011100100110010101
11101000100000010010000110100101101
100011101000110111101101110″.
That’s a lot of thread for a bloated queen.
Enough about the prolix communication of Mystical Looms, what about the characters?
They speak in a binary of sorts as well. We’ll let the 0s be represented by a word that rhymes with motherclucker, and the 1s be represented by that most linguistically utilitarian profanity, the scatological s-word. The profanities are punctuated with screams of pain and–as my grandpa likes to say–long meaningful looks.
Angelina Jolie’s most profound line is “No.” Most of the time she remains silent, coolly eying the camera with her Cleopatra eyes and asp-like arms. Perhaps her mind is elsewhere, rolling the philanthropic dice on a new developing country to add to her brood. There is a nice scene that briefly shows the Northern border of her derriere, but I was too distracted by the hemoglobe’d roadmap of veins slithering down her arms. Note: Anything that male professional bodybuilders strive for–in this case vascularity–IS NOT FREAKING ATTRACTIVE. Madonna, I’m looking at you too. (As a side note, maybe she and A-rod have the same supplier? ((As a double side note, if A-Rod does take too many steroids he may need a new nickname)) (That’s right: embedded and adjacent parenthesis. Live with it.)
Our Hero, James McAvoy, is a typical modern man. He is a gelding unwilling to buck off a boss who rides him at work, and ignores his girlfriend riding the stallion next door. Of course, in a Hollywood summer movie appealing to sweaty testosterone, these are Bad Things™. It would be nice if a movie recognized the quiet courage it takes to endlessly take shit from a boss or the self-discipline to not paint your girl’s face black and blue.
Not that this character would be the Poster Boy for such a paradigm shift (oh no he di’n't!). He’s really just a whiny bitch.
We are supposed to feel sorry for our hero. I never do. He alternates between being a flaccid pill-popper and screaming sissy. Most of the first half of the movie is comprised of the holy trinity of his: squealing in varying degrees of pitch, stringing together curses, and asking questions that have no answers. Not exactly someone I root for. Most hero movies rely on the archetype of the inverted-Kafka-metamorphosis. To start, our hero is a scurrying giant cockroach. He is supposed to have moments of humanity that pierce through the miasma of mediocrity that entombs him. We are supposed cheer as the hero begins to awaken and see the shadows on the wall. He leaves the safe cave for an exciting and violent world of unquestionable killings and promised glory. Hmm, blindly killing people based on faith in a mystical being – as interpreted by a hierarchical organization. A better movie would examine this concept more closely. Wanted brushes it away with Angelina Jolie’s cheery anecdote about watching her father being burned alive because she did not perform an assassination. TMartyrdom is again hinted at when mice are strapped with explosives in the film’s deus ex machina.
We’re supposed to find it satisfying that McAvoy breaks his best friends nose and kisses Jolie in front of his girlfriend. Our eyes be brimming with pride as he becomes an army of one, shooting scores of nameless lackeys, ugly igors, mean-looking & bald minorities, and rich cigar-smoking-whities (I guess assassins aren’t patient enough for emphysema or lung cancer eventually expunging their targets). There’s the typical montage–I’d love to have royalties to the song, “Eye of the Tiger”–of our hero training hard, getting beatup, and reading books. There is much growth and yet none at all. He still is manipulated; still being used. Learning how to kill people better is kind of like learning how to do a blackflip – a nice trick at cocktail parties.
There is also the idea that fallible man can corrupt and modify the word of god (loom). Morgan Freeman plays the his typical wise-old-man with a gleam in his eye. Apparently he is the only one who bothers to interpret the Loom’s binary threading. The profanity sodden dialogue even seeps into his speech, where he reverts the blaxploitation of the 70s, politely asking his henchmen to, “Shoot this muthafuckah.” An audience of cloned Samuel L. Jacksons (horror movie concept?) may grin at this, but the rest of us will blush. Freeman is the freaking guy whose sanguine narration anthromorphized emperor penguins.
In the end, this movie propagates colored cheeks. We blush over Angelina’s robotic performance. We squirm during Freeman’s Tourette’s. We feel awkward at the director’s primary obsession with exploding human heads, secondary obsession with exploding mice, and tertiary obsession with explosive language.
If you pray before the alter of Dionysian savagry, then go see this movie. If you like a dollop of reason and a pinch of taste mixed within your summer blockbuster stew, skip it.
