Chattanooga Pulse

Written by John DeVore
Wednesday, 02 July 2008 17:20
Violence without substance equals plain dumb
Apparently, director Timur Bekmambetov wants us to believe that one thousand years ago, a group of weavers discovered a Loom of Fate, circa the Industrial Revolution, that spouted out names of people deserving death. The Loom uses a secret, mystical language, deciphered by the weavers by assigning ones and zeros to slight imperfections in the cloth, because as any computer programmer will tell you, binary is magic and computers were sent to us by the gods.
As a result, this group of weavers formed an organization of super-assassins that can do all sorts of impossible things for improbable reasons: things like violating Newton’s Laws of Motion and John’s Laws of Doing Stupid Things With CarsTM. Thus, the premise of Wanted. Taking what is now known from this premise, take a handful of action movie clichés, throw them in the air, arrange them in any order, and hand them to a producer. A movie that is equivalently idiotic can easily be produced. If any of the above sounds enticing to you, please, stop seeing movies. You’re ruining it for the rest of us.
I don’t know why the assassins were initially weavers. It isn’t explained. Nothing is explained in this film. I was making an educated guess as to the discovery of the Loom of Fate in the movie. It very well could be that the original members made it. Who knows? It doesn’t matter really, because like everything else in the picture, The Loom serves as a plot device. Judging from audience reactions, no one cared but me. Your typical moviegoer must have an extreme ability to suspend their disbelief, as the second scene included a man jumping through a skyscraper window to another skyscraper deftly firing his pistols with deadly accuracy. The people that were in my theatre didn’t need little annoyances like exposition.
It’s not as if the fantastical nature of the film bothered me. I remember watching Marv leap from buildings in Sin City. And I remember that film being strongly and violently intriguing. Sin City kept my attention both visually and thematically, flowing seamlessly from story to story, interweaving character and misappropriated values together in a cohesive, entertaining storyline. Wanted has the comic-book action but without the virtue of anti-heroic confliction. Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) begins the story without a sense of self. He ends the story in the same way, only with dumber circumstances.
In what might be considered the overarching “Theme of the Picture,” Wesley is a loser trapped in white-collar mediocrity and corporate complacency. He has anxiety attacks and his girlfriend is boning his best friend. He equates his self-worth with the number of hits his name produces on Google, which turns out to be precisely zero. This attack on the culture of the cubicle has been explored in more detail and with better results in several movies. The first “Matrix” took the ideas self, control, and freedom and wrapped it in a sci-fi tale of wet concrete and cool gunfights. Wanted uses these ideas as a surface means to an end, one that merely gives the illusion of insight. It serves as bookends for wanton, useless violence. The film has material built into its story, as stupid as it is, that has the possibility of an intellectual look at the relationship between ennui and violent escapism, but it has no interest in pursuing this avenue. Instead, it focuses on absurd stunts and obvious “wit” to drive home a plot without a soul. To quote another movie that understands the derision of the American downtrodden service worker, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.”
I may be taking too strong a stand on the side of quality in the face of this summer’s blockbuster movies. Wanted will certainly fulfill the need for bloody gunfights and violent titillation. But the story is moronic and inexplicable, the themes re-hashed and underutilized, and the stunts preposterous. I did mention that the movie is about a secret society of assassins, right? And that the best name they could come up in one thousand years was “The Fraternity?” Maybe next they can play the Secret Society of Super Villains in flag football. I’m sure Universal has it slated for release in summer 2010.

Wanted
Rated R
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman
Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes