Comic Book Movies 101: Wanted

• 24th Feb 2011

Wanted

Wanted tells the story of everyday deadbeat Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) who discovers that his father was an elite assassin with The Fraternity, a group of mercenaries who are now keen for him to join them. He’s recruited into the organisation by the pouting Fox (Angelina Jolie) who schools him in the art of bending bullets. Slowly things begin to unravel as a conspiracy within The Fraternity threatens to destroy both of them.

After joining, The Fraternity Gibson is taken through the inevitable training sequence as he’s sent out on missions to kill people (as ordered by his boss Morgan Freeman). At one point in this training process McAvoy is still having a problem bending bullets around a pig carcass. To create the necessary fear in his mind Jolie steps in front of the hanging meat to force Gibson to face his inevitable destiny. Personally I feel that the film would have much better had Gibson killed Fox at this point before turning the gun on himself, thus allowing the end credits to role.

The endless Matrix style action and slow motion nonsense simply leads the eyes to close slowly bringing on a coma-like state in the viewer. Director Timur Bekmambetov adopts the visual style that brought him great success in his Day Watch and Night Watch films. But this time the results are so glossy that the viewer fails to engage with the characters. In the end it feels little more than a vacuous advert for some product.

To say this is a bad film really doesn’t cover it at all. Wanted is easily in the running for the worst graphic novel adaptation of all time and was a strong contender for worst film of 2008. Just like the legendary graphic novel Watchmen, Mark Millar has written Wanted in such a way that it’s simply un-filmable given the narrative, sexual content and insane violence. The filmmakers have gotten around this by simply making some Bourne hybrid with CGI bullet-bending thrown in for fantasy purposes. The imaginative and highly unique world created in the original graphic novel is populated by a raft of super-villains which counterbalance the superheroes – but the film simply bypasses this important facet altogether.

The combination of McAvoy and Jolie is a disaster of mesmerising proportions with both looking for the exit out of this utter turkey of a film. One must feel especially sad for McAvoy coming off the success of The Last King of Scotland, making the big Hollywood leap only to land in this pile of trash. As for Jolie, her career for the most part has become an endless cycle of one poor film after another, so no change with this outing.

By the conclusion you simply wish everyone would die to ensure that nothing even resembling a sequel could ever exist. This film is a sad result of the endless amounts of graphic novels now becoming big budget movies. It’s almost impossible to believe the writers even read the original. Simply awful in every capacity, Wanted represents the worst of big budget small-minded Hollywood product that we could all do without.

Aled Jones