Wanted: More

Wanted is one of those movies that exists because the makers of the film imagined some wonderful action sequences and thought, "Let's build a movie around those." Anyone who's ever seen the movies of John Woo knows how this model of movie making works. You get awesome scenes of guy jumping through windows, taking out 3 assassins before smashing through a window in the next building and taking out the fourth. When that's over, you get scenes like Morgan Freeman explaining how God tells us to kill people by causing looms to occasionally miss a stitch and that is not a joke. The way to judge a movie like this is to determine whether the entertainment value of the cool parts outweighs the "What the hell is this crap?" value of the non-cool parts. As far as Wanted goes, I'll say yes, but not by much.

When the movie opens, we're informed that a society of assassins called the Fraternity has been around for 1000 years killing all the world's big meanies. Anyone who paid attention in history class knows right off the bat what a crap job these guys have been doing for the last millennium. Why didn't they take out guys like Napoleon and Hitler? Was there a Charles in Charge marathon they days they were supposed to do that or something?

Anyway, apparently a guy named Cross, one of the Fraternity's very best people, has gone rogue. The scene I described in the first paragraph is where Cross confronts the loyal Fraternity man who's been sent to kill him. Since Cross seems to be the movie's villain, you can guess who wins that fight. Enter Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy. Having only seen McAvoy in movies like Becoming Jane and Atonement, I was surprised to see that he owned pants that weren't made from uncomfortably tight leather and shirts that weren't puffy. Anyway, Wesley works for a company that may as well be called GeneriCo because it's one of those movie businesses where you can't tell what the hell it is that they actually do. Wesley leads a hopeless existence of quiet desperation in his cubicle where he's constantly berated by his sadistic boss about billing reports while his best friend has sex with his girlfriend. Only the anti-anxiety drugs he takes make his life bearable and it's when he's refilling his prescription for those that his life changes.

Wesley meets the aptly named Fox who is aptly played by Angelina Jolie. She seems unnaturally interested in him but before he can try to impress her with pickup lines that, knowing him, would almost certainly would have referenced comic books or Monty Python, a gun battle breaks out. It turns out that Fox is there to protect Wesley from Cross who's after him for unbelievable reasons that will be made clear later. At this moment, all you, the audience, have to do is marvel at the extended stunts and car chases that ensue as Fox and Wesley try to elude Cross. They do and Fox brings him to meet the Fraternity, headed up by Morgan Freeman's character, Sloan. They tell Wesley that he has super powers he never knew about (the anti-anxiety drugs were actually suppressing them) and that he inherited them from his father, the guy Cross killed when the movie opened.

After a series of rigorous and sadistic training exercises, Sloan shows Wesley the Loom of Fate. It turns out that the Fraternity was founded 1000 years ago by a group of weavers who discovered that AND AGAIN THIS IS NOT A JOKE God or Fate or whatever talks to us through the stitches in cloth and tells us who has to die to make the world into a bright and cheery place. It's a hell of a thing to think that someone has to die because someone else's T-shirt has an end out or a pinhole but who are we to judge the wisdom of that big creel in the sky? Believe it or not, this was one of the smarter plot points and the turns and twists of the story get dumber from this point on. The question is, does it matter? A movie like this doesn't have an intelligent storyline because coming up with an intelligent storyline is hard and the movie doesn't really need one. Wanted is a series of action sequences with a plot stuffed into it so that you can relax and catch your breath in between fights and car chases and I think the action was pretty good.

Still...

I think I'm going to have a problem with movies like this for a while and the cause of that problem is Iron Man. Iron Man was a great action movie that had interesting plot developments and intelligent characters that you actually cared about. If a character dies in Wanted, not only do you not care but you barely notice. If Tony Stark or Pepper Potts had died in Iron Man, you'd be pissed. Iron Man has raised the bar for what would ordinarily be mindless summer action films and it's going to be a while before I stop comparing movies like Wanted to Iron Man.

Oh well, you'll have to excuse me now. The threads in my pants are telling me that I have to track down Kim Jong Il and give him a wedgie.

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