Dragging and undramatic stylistic action sequences

Rating: 4/10 (1 July 2008)

I was able to catch this movie for free, and thank God I didn't spend money on this. Basically, the director from Night Watch slows it down a bit (just a bit) and makes a cheesy, bland action flick about a guy who joins the Fraternity, a secret group of assassins. Now, me, I have a special place in my heart for assassins, rogues, cat burglers, snipers, and sneaky marginalized heroes of all types, so I understand that it's really a matter of taste when I say I didn't care much for the type of "world-saving" assassin that flips cars and blows up trains shown in this film. On the other hand, I don't think it's a matter of taste when I say that it's stupid to watch a movie where a guy walking across the street gets the same stylistic cutting and zoom-sound editing as a guy trying to pick off a target from a moving train. Night Watch was frustrating because its most beautiful images (and thus, basically, the reason to watch the film) were cut away merely for stylistic effect; Wanted at least has some images that you can linger on and enjoy, but they ultimately begin to drag under poor stylistic direction and, of course, a pretty ridiculous storyline.
Another thing is the concept behind the curving bullets. Me, I can accept such an idea in a movie of this type because it's not so much trying to be real as it's trying to provide a neat new approach to action and the movie does at least bother to explain it (somewhat), which is nice. But what with all the other things that happen in this movie, one discovers that what those characters are using are not guns. Guns don't shoot out knives that got jammed up their barrel, they backfire. Guns don't bend barrels around corners and then have the bullet follow the path of the barrel, they backfire. Guns can't be held like a friggin' baseball, they have this thing known as "kick-back". There's only so far things like that can go before what you're watching is not a gun battle, but honestly just a really boring exposition of some guy magically making all of his opponents die without a scratch. And that's not exciting, tense, or really much of anything, because there's no drama in it. I mean, really, all the jump-cuts in the world don't replace the need for some logical foil in plot to give our intrepid hero something to strive against. (And besides, in a world where people believe The Da Vinci Code is real, 10000 BC is an historical exploration into our past, and the selective trivia of National Treasure has any true referent in our nation's history, I can't help but wonder how many stupid people are actually going to try this curving bullet thing.)
Ultimately, there's a lot of really good movies out there right now, and it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would really want to go see this one instead. Oh wait: it does have a shot of Angelina Jolie's butt. And for better or for worse, Morgan Freeman is always an interesting actor. Oh, and, well, all of the office scenes work for a sort of follow-up to Office Space style humour and catharsis. But, basically, all of that exposition is in about the first half of the movie, so once the unearned "twist" in the plot occurs about two-thirds in, you'll pretty much know all of the plot you need to know and seen all of the images you need to see, and you can leave there.
--PolarisDiB