"Wanted"

I know more about movies than almost everyone I have ever met. This is the result of a combination: an essentially type-A personality with essentially type-Z fascinations. On that fateful day in late 1997, had I perhaps picked up a copy of "Genetics Today" instead of "Entertainment Weekly," I would probably be at a second-tier (yet up-and-coming) Med School right now. I know the complete cast of films I've never seen - hell, I know every other film each member of the cast has been in. I can list every film by every director working in Hollywood today. I know which screenwriters doctored which films (as a rule of thumb - it's almost always Scott Frank or John August, unless it's a Spielberg film, when it's usually Tom Stoppard.) My knowledge of film history and film style is nearly unparalleled, which means I try not to talk about movies with anyone but my closest friends.

I can remember once, years ago, my brother and I were trying to find a movie that we could watch with some family friends. We had been talking for months about watching "The Manchurian Candidate," a film classic which was not at any of our local Blockbusters. When I found it, naturally I proposed renting it. Uh-uh, said my wise elder , who gave me the best advice ever: "People don't like the movies we choose." I'm not sure if he meant "we" as in him and me (because of our distinctive taste), or "we" as in people who actually enjoy black-and-white paranoid dark-comic thrillers featuring Frank Sinatra and the naked chick from Psycho, but of course he was absolutely right. I believe we rented "The Messenger" instead, a horrible film which was at least recently horrible, whereas "The Manchurian Candidate" was anciently good.

In an effort not to appear overly conceited (if not outright geekish), I always check myself when I talk to non-film people, which is in itself overly conceited, but I always like to see how people react to movies when they didn't grow up reading film reviews or spend years studying film form. And they're less likely to be honest if I spout off a soliloquy (like the one I'm about to text-spout here.)

Such a situation has occurred recently in my discussion with normals about "Wanted," the bloodier and less philosophical remake of "The Matrix" which claims to star Angelina Jolie but actually features her in a supporting role with hardly any dialogue, save for one extended speech in which she obliquely describes her tragic past. I suppose that this speech gives her character more "depth," but considering that the rest of the role is practically wordless, it actually makes her completely uninteresting. Perhaps without even meaning to, her role in the film evokes other great star turns with little dialogue, like Mel Gibson in "Mad Max" or Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful of Dollars."

Of course, both Max and the Man With No Name had fairly straightforward goals (respectively, get the oil and get the money), whereas Angelina Jolie's Fox (she's either named after Fox McCloud in "Starfox" or the character Fox in the fictional TV show in Kelly Link's short masterwork "Magic for Beginners) is such a cipher that she could basically do anything at any time without surprise. At one point, she kisses her costar, James McAvoy, but the kiss comes so completely out of nowhere - there's been no sexual tension, no real flirtation, so it's never clear whether she's actually attracted to him (unlikely), or whether she's just kissing him to make him look like a badass in front of his cheating ex-girlfriend, currently screaming at him. In which case you have to ask, why is this movie trying so hard to make James McAvoy look cool?

Several normals have told me that "Wanted" is stylish - some of the more academic among them even note that, although the movie wasn't great, the director is clearly talented and has a "style" - but really, not a single thing happens in "Wanted" that's genuinely "stylish," unless you conceive style as a random throwing-together of tiny little raw ideas conceived by an ADD-ridden seventh grader in the first throes of his self-sexual revolution.

For instance: there's a scene early in the movie where a guy gets his head blown off by a sniper bullet. The bullet pauses, then suddenly reverses in slow motion. Yes, this is cool, but what high schooler with a camera hasn't thought of this: "Dude! Wouldn't it be cool if you're staring at the guy, and suddenly, a bullet EXPLODES through his forehead, and then ALMOST hits the camera, but then it suddenly goes to reverse slow motion, SUPER SUPER SLOW so you can see him BLINK when the BULLET ENTERS HIS HEAD!"

Really, the problem with this scene is that it doesn't go far enough. Why couldn't it suddenly shift into forward-and-even-slower motion, perhaps with a close-up on the bullet, so we can see it migrate its way through skin and bone and brain and bone and eye? Why not then shift into reverse again, even slower now, and back and forth like a tidal wave? Really, when you show a guy getting shot through the head twice, essentially giving yourself your own instant replay, why not show it three times, five times, ten times?

There are two moments of genius in this movie which hint, I think, at the tone that it's going for - puckish nihilism - and neither of them involve violence, although both involve the threat of violence, which is a much more interesting thing. Early in the movie, an Indian woman with a red bindi dot on her forehead is sitting at a table, and suddenly another red dot, from a sniper rifle, lines up with the one on her forehead. Hilarious, and dirty, and so wrong. Later in the movie - in fact, almost the entire movie later - Morgan Freeman will say the word "Motherfucker." Again, genius.

Everything else in "Wanted" is little more than schoolboy masochism. McAvoy is playing the Keanu Reeves role - he's a wage slave who suddenly finds out he's special, because he has the ability to "bend" bullets. Also, his heart can beat really fast. But mainly, he can bend bullets. (This whole "bending" thing is cool the first hundred times they do it and endlessly lame forever after, at which point you're shocked by the restraint the Wachowski Brothers showed in "The Matrix" - their bullets might have gone slow, but they always went straight.) He's welcomed into "The Fraternity," a team of assassins who, (we are told in an opening text, and again later by Morgan Freeman, and yet again later by a few other characters), was founded by a guild of Weavers hundreds of years ago. Weavers, sure, what the fuck.

Anyways, McAvoy needs to be taught assassinhood, and for the next half hour, he is "taught." The teaching method is fairly simple: beat him up, stab him, throw him off of a train, shoot him, break his fingers and toes backward, and generally knock him out. Yup, it's a subtle re-enactment of "The Passion of the Christ," except everytime he gets knocked unconscious, he wakes up in a glue-ish Bacta Tank which completely heals his wounds and gets him ready for more punishment.

So, just to recap, this is a movie which, in its first hour, shows A) one person getting killed over and over again, and B) another person getting beaten up over and over again. Naturally, this regimen of ass-kicking turns McAvoy into a gun-wielding, bullet-bending, muscle-cut badass, ready to hunt down his father's killer.

There follows two of the most ridiculous scenes in movie history, although one is kind of fun. The one that isn't fun is the scene where Morgan Freeman, as the kindly head assassin, explains to McAvoy how things work in "The Fraternity." Bear with wikipedia here: "Once he has completed his training, Wesley [that's McAvoy] is given orders to kill people from the Loom of Fate, a cloth spinning machine that gives the names of the targets through a binary code hidden in the weaving of the threads, a process which Wesley initially finds suspicious."

I love that last phrase, "a process which Wesley initially finds suspicious." What if a group of Plumbers had founded the Fraternity of Assassins, and they were given orders to kill by throwing certain types of feces (bald eagle, vestal virgin, hobo turtle) against a white wall and converting the resulting images to binary. Would Wesley find such a process "suspicious?"

Anyways, since the "Loom of Fate" scene essentially announces that, in the world of "Wanted," black is white and kangaroos have wings, the scene in which Jolie drives a car into a train (right before the train falls down a canyon but fortunately the car with Jolie and McAvoy inside gets happily jammed between cliff faces) plays like a subtle comedown. Watching the train action scene in "Wanted," I was reminded of the train action scene in "Mission: Impossible" and the train action scene in "The Train," which is actually a movielength train action scene, now that I think about it. Then I started thinking about the train flirtation scenes in "North by Northwest" and "Before Sunrise." Then I realized that it's completely impossible to do a bad scene onboard a train. I think it's because it has the same claustrophobia and sense of high-speed danger as airplanes, but without the annoying crammed feeling and with much more interesting scenery outside the window.

However, there follows another huge action scene, which can't help but be a comedown after you've seen a train fall down a canyon. This is the first reason why, I would argue, "Wanted," even at its best (which is never very good), lacks style - everyone knows you should save your best for last.

The last action sequence features a long scene, in which McAvoy runs through a weaving facility in slow motion and kills a few dozen people, picking up guns along the way. I tried to figure out why this scene was so much less effective than a similar scene in "Commando." After all, McAvoy is a much better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. More abstractly, haven't action movies gotten better since then? In "Commando," Arnold basically throws around a bunch of grenades, fires two machine guns, and famously chops off one guy's arm with an axe. In "Wanted," McAvoy executes several moves taken from various forms of kung fu and ballet, and uses all kinds of different guns. Whereas "Commando" is one-note, this scene in "Wanted" would seem to be well-designed.

Except it isn't, because the whole thing is cut to fucking hell. Which is when I realized the problem: the director of "Wanted" can only conceive of style as something he (and his puppet editor) can create, so his "stylish" scenes are basically scenes constructed entirely in tiny little bits that are meant to make the characters cool. Note that I said "characters," because "Wanted" doesn't really make the "actors" look cool. Though I'm sure McAvoy trained long and hard for this movie, he isn't a natural athlete, he isn't a kung fu star, he doesn't know how to fire two guns at once, and he certainly can't execute a Wall-Jumping Backwards Dragon Kick, so really, the scene is designed to HIDE McAvoy as much as possible.

Think of it this way: every cool movement that McAvoy makes is usually split into four shots. This means that there were four different takes of McAvoy doing that movement, and in each of those takes, 75% of the footage was McAvoy looking like a funny little Irish kid trying to be Jet Li. But 25 % of the footage, he actually LOOKED a bit like Jet Li, so if we mash all those tiny percentages together, we get 100, right?

Because the director of "Wanted" has no real concept of onscreen choreography, the overall effect of watching an action sequence from the film is a queasy headache and an urge to destroy humanity to save humanity. Compare this film to "Wall-E," a film which I loved but found a bit flawed until I saw "Wanted" and then realized that it might actually be my favorite movie all year. What's great about Pixar is that there's always a very vivid sense of onscreen space. True, that space is a completely imaginary digital composition, but once you've started watching any Pixar film, you get absorbed in the world onscreen. Places in Pixar movies feel like Places - Wall-E's shack, or the Toys in their playroom, or the Dentist's office in "Finding Nemo," or the family home in "The Incredibles."

The "style" of wanted is every style: slow-motion! fast-motion! shaky closeups! operatic slow-motion special effects leaps-across-buildings! bloodbloodbloodblood! If the "style" of "Wanted" were clothes, it would be made fun of in Vice Magazine.