Wanted Review

If it were not for Indy 4 I would call this movie “The biggest disappointment of the summer.” If it were not for The Strangers I would call this movie “The worst movie I’ve seen all summer.” Because those two very fitting titles for this movie have already been claimed, I will call this movie “The biggest waste of my time and money of the summer.” Though The Strangers is the worst, with that movie I at least got a bag of free popcorn to ease the pain of enduring watching Liv Tyler run around in an apparently big enough house that you can’t barricade every entrance and cry and whine about people in masks who really didn’t do anything until the very end of the movie. Plus, The Strangers never promised to be something spectacular, like every bit of promotional material for Wanted did.
Speaking of which, wow, what a trailer Wanted birthed. It starts with Angelina Jolie telling a loser his dad is the best assassin in the world but someone killed him oddly enough; then Morgan Freeman makes a bullet go around a dead pig and then narrates the overall theme of the movie that has the undertone of an American Army commercial as scenes of flying cars, shooting guns, and more slow motion shots than a Matrix fanboy’s wet dream, are thrown at us. Then it is all concluded with the tagline, “The choice is yours” there really isn’t any choice to be made here, because at this point you are hooked. Unfortunately being the one that is hooked means that you are going to be eaten…by a bad movie and a worse main character.
You see, when the main character starts out the movie whining about how crappy his life is I, as an audience member, have a hard time trying to like the kid. And then when he doesn’t shut up during one of the few cool scenes in the movie and constantly yells “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!” or “Ohhhhhhhhh” I really want him to die. The character probably worked in the comics, a darker Peter Parker, a nobody whose life suddenly turns upside-down. It worked in the comics because Wesley Gibson is a believable character that has a regular job, a cruddy relationship, who cusses and gets pissy just like anyone else, the one thing that I don’t think the producers took into account of the transformation from comic to movie is the fact that we will now get to listen to Wesley…a horrible, horrible thing. It was like listening to a cranky old person half the time, and a bitchy 13-year-old girl the other half. Dreadful.
Now the scenes that didn’t involve Wesley, (who was played by James McAvoy who might be playing the young Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jacksons upcoming two-part movie The Hobbit) were pretty decent. The action scenes were well shot, the special effects were spot on, and the portrayal of certain characters was well done. I will give Timur Bekmambetov thumbs up for creating the most comic-book comic-book movie I think I have seen. I have never read or seen the comic for Wanted but there were scenes in the movie where I could just imagine how they looked in the comic-book. If I can find any I will attach some comic-book movie comparison pictures below here just to prove my point.

Bekmambetov should have left it a comic book. The story became sluggish after about the one-hour mark, and it relied too heavily on the bloodbath of an ending after that point. Like I said before I am sure it worked in the comic as comics are told monthly in a small 30-page book, so great scenes are done in about 7 or 8 pictures. Thus when transferred to a movie, a picture that was badass looks pretty ridiculous in motion.
If you can get past Wesley Gibson’s complaining at the beginning and can accept some pretty ridiculous things…*ehhhm*ratbombs*ehhmmm*…then you might find Wanted an enjoyable 2ish hours. I didn’t, but now I know that a giant loom wove JFK’s name deep within the fabric and that the “magic bullet theory” is what went down. Just kidding. 5.9/10