Sounds Delicious

I watched a bootleg copy of “Wanted” the other day.  It was a gift, and not a very good one.  Not-a-very-good gift of a not-a-very-good bootleg of not-a-very-good movie.  It’s not horrible, actually; it was directed by that guy who did ”Night Watch” and ”Day Watch”, so as with those movies there is a sense of shameless abandon that makes the whole idiotic mess easier to swallow.  It’s the kind of movie you would make if “Star Wars”, “The Matrix”, and “Fight Club” were the only movies you had ever seen.  I know that last comment sounds more like endorsement than dismissal, and trust me, I have absolutely loved movies that were way shittier than this one.  But something rubbed me the wrong way throughout.  It could have been so enjoyable, so mindless, so silly, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with their choice of villain.  No, not that guy that they trick James McAvoy into killing, who turns out to be the worst father since Darth Vader.  And not Morgan Freeman, who I hope got paid pretty well.  The villain I’m talking about is me.  The guy watching the movie through some jack-off’s handheld camera.  Or you, sitting next to me, or next to that jack-off with the camera.  The main theme of “Wanted” seems to be that not killing people — a reasonable lifestyle choice for most of us — is somehow socially irresponsible, or at least lazy.  After assassinating Morgan Freeman with some kind of ancient whaling bullet at the film’s conclusion, our hero looks at the camera and says, “What the fuck have you done lately?”  

Given McAvoy’s incredibly meek existence at the start of the film — Oh, he’s an anxiety-riddled accountant who’s being cuckolded by his best friend, but you could have guessed that — it is a bit of a stretch to have him jump on the random-assassination bandwagon so quickly, and even more so when you factor in the initial training, which is just him getting beaten up over and over again.  Then consider his gullibility: at no point does he question something told to him by any admitted murderer, even one that just knocked him out, shot at him, or simply stands over him as he wakes up in a sweaty factory surrounded by frowning thugs.  This all leads to the deaths of countless strangers (presumably because they will someday cause some atrocity; you know, like what “Minority Report” was about, except here it’s seen as a good thing), the death of his father and of virtually every other person in the film.  Yet, as all this winds down and McAvoy stumbles down the street, broke, beat up, wanted by the police, he takes a moment to say something like, “I used to be a pathetic asshole, just like you.”  Now I know that sounds amazing on paper.  Irony so thick you’d need the entire cast of “Armageddon” to cut through it.  Perhaps that is why they managed to get so many apparent humanitarians involved: Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Common.  The fact that the finished film is purely cynical, self-righteous, and grotesque makes their presence puzzling if not entirely distracting.  All that potential for ambiguity and irony, and the closest thing Bekmambetov could muster was a kind of indifferent sarcasm.

As I’ve said before, I have worshipped trashier movies than this.  Most big movies are simply a vehicle for violent acts, in which the filmmakers weave some elaborate scenario that justifies Mel Gibson putting a gun in someone’s mouth while they’re chained to a moving bus.  But I found the whole attitude of “Wanted” distracting.  That combined with the fact that it really is not very good, I couldn’t decide if I had just spent two hours watching idiots portray assholes or watching assholes portray idiots.  Oh, and there’s an awful lot of cruelty to animals in this picture, most of it executed with perverse glee.  But oh well, as long as you’re living life to the fullest, eh?