Another boring action movie.

Rating: 2/10 (6 September 2008)

I think the reason I don't like action movies very much is because they tend to be just dramas in disguise, and Wanted is nothing different. It's hard for me to remember an action movie that actually had actionsuch as in Aliens and Kill Billand wasn't just a Lifetime TV drama about how the main character has family problems and he tries to fix them . . . oh, and then his car blows up. Or in this case, he has family problems, he gets in a gun fight, and he tries to fix his family problems again.
It's the biggest cliché in the book: a son tries to elevate to the level of his godlikeinsert one of the following: warrior/assassin/ninja/etc.father that died before he was born. That's how Wanted starts out, with the oldest cliché known to man, and from that point on it only delve deeper into cliché after cliché. I'm not even going to go into how unoriginal this movie is, it would take me pages, and even the dumbest person out there can sit there and realize they saw the exact same plot line in Star Wars and a hundred other movies as well. In my theater, at the point of the plot twist, I had to say under my breath: "Luke, I am your father . . . " It got more laughs from my row than any of the intentional humor in this movie.
The rest plot is more ridicules than rip-off. I think when the writer realized how unoriginal his script was he had to think of the lamest "original" idea he could: randomly selecting a name from a loom and killing the person. And we call old horror movies cheesy yet call this completely reasonable? As far as the characters go, every one of them is a cliché. Morgan Freeman is the cliché old man who makes ordersalso seen in every action movie ever conceived. Angelina Jolie plays the mysterious vixen with no more personality than a dying treealso seen in close to every action movie ever made. James McAvoy plays the unsuspecting looseralso seen in every action movie since the 70's. So, the characters and plot are worthless and boring, how about the action itself? The gunfights were the sole thing this movie did right. Well, that is until you get to the cliché slow-motion head shots that are no more graphic than images of someone throwing up red Kool-aid. It seems that any action movie that has come out after The Matrix uses slow-motion kills anymore, and the style is just as bland as it has ever been. Also, this is not a gory action movie at all. If you want a graphic action movie, go watch Predator or the unrated version of Death Sentence. But sadly I can't even complement Wanted on being graphic, because though there is a decent amount of blood on the floor, how it gets there is PG or PG-13 rated.
In the end, Wanted is just as boring as every other boring action movie. I give it some credit for trying to be a little differentat least it's not another movie about terrorists again. But it fails in everything it tries. It fails at being thrilling. It fails at getting the manly-man message across about how men are boring like the main character was before he became a cliché . . . err, before he became an assassin.
Oh the irony: it's more boring than it says the people watching it are.
2/10.