Stylish Snuff

Rating: 5/10 (6 June 2018)

To call Wanted an "action movie" would be like calling Cannibal Holocaust a "horror flick". This movie is one step removed from being the most stylish snuff film ever made. Wanted is full of flair, inventive action scenes, and good special effects and sound, but it is thoroughly violent. Taken on craft alone, Wanted is good, but factor in the effect of the endless scenes of vicious, bloody murder, and this becomes a film you endure rather than enjoy.
Wanted is about James McAvoy's Wesley, a frustrated office worker who is recruited by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman into an underground assassin community to finish his legendary gun master father's last job. Or at least that is what the plot summary is about. In reality, Wanted is about violence. Lots and lots of increasingly brutal violence. Wesley and Fox (Jolie) kill gobs of hulking thugs, sometimes in creative ways, but always with bullets. Lots of bullets. And that's the movie, basically. Characters stop and talk here and there, but almost no single scene ends without somebody getting maimed or killed.
Those scenes of protracted murder start out kind of fun. There are some imaginative sniper scenes, with long slow motion tracking shots of the bullet as it passes through the air, and Fox teaches Wesley to curve bullets in a memorable early scene. Director Timur Bekmambetov takes a hard-edged, gritty kind of style and rolls with it. For about an hour, you might get caught up in the mayhem. By the end, it's just too much. The movie is under two hours, but without any kind of engaging story to prop up the action, fatigue sets in quick. As things get more and more gruesome, the slickness of the bloodshed is lost, replaced by a feeling of nauseous unpleasantness. I understand Wanted is no family film, and I can get into angry, stress-relieving ultra-violence as much as anybody, but Wanted is a bridge too far for me. It is a very mean spirited movie, taking way too much gleeful pleasure in blowing the brains out of hundreds of heads.
That's where the movie really crossed into snuff territory for me. I can handle violence. I can handle very gruesome violence. But the kind of sustained gun porn seen in Wanted would test anyone's stomach. The action is done well, and in a shorter, more absorbing story, it would work. By itself, drawn out over almost two hours, it doesn't. Your results may vary, but after a while, I was entirely turned off by Wanted.
54/100