Monday, February 16, 2009

Movie Log: Wanted

Wanted is the silliest movie I have ever seen; it's perilously close to being the silliest movie I can imagine.

It's about a secret society of assassins who take their orders from a magic loom, which transmits the will of Fate, in the form of binary-encoded names of their targets. And this binary code has been in use, we're led to believe, for a thousand years.

I'm already laughing out loud, and I haven't even gotten to the making-bullets-go-around-corners-by-swinging-the-gun-and-pulling-O-faces part. Or the "you killed my father!" "I am your father!" dialogue, which would have been side-splitting if it had just happened one or two more times.

We just saw it tonight, because it looked like a stylish action movie, and The Wife likes James MacAvoy even more than I like Angelina Jolie. (I'm not all that fond of her, to be honest, but she's cute and can usually act.) Well, it does have style -- I have to give it that -- but there's not a single thought in its pretty little head.

Timur Bekmambetov, congratulations! You made one of the funniest movies of 2008. (And didn't I remember hearing that the movie actually toned down the craziness of the comic it was based on?) This is not a movie to be seen by anyone who treasures the virtues of coherence, sweet reason, or basic plausibility. The Wife did appreciate a couple tight close-ups of MacAvoy's eyes, though, so at least it has that going for it.

4 comments:

Michael A. Burstein said...

You should read the Mark Millar comic series, which exists as a trade paperback. If you know anything about the DC Comics universe, you'll appreciate it. The whole conceit is quite different from the film, which is rather loosely based on the series.

RobB said...

What Michael said.

From what I've heard, the first 10 minutes of the film matches pretty closely to the first few pages of the comic.

The series is one of Millar's better efforts (I'm usually not a fan) and boasts terrific art by J.G. Jones. However, the ending of the comic was pretty lame.

Anonymous said...

Following up on what the others have said: My understanding is that the filmmakers optioned the comic after the first issue, which ended when the "protagonist" shoots the winds off the flies.

The screenwriters didn't know what was going to be in issue 2, and took the story off on their own path. According to the story I heard, the filmmakers thought the comic was ridiculous.

Harry

Anonymous said...

Eagle Eye is way more silly a movie.

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