slightly Wanted

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2008)

I absolutely love Angelina and James as actors. While this movie was o-k, it was not the stellar beginning of summer movie punch that I anticipated it to be. Sure, there's lots of action with good special effects (though I personally believe it could've been better, but maybe with so much effects infused into one movie, they had to settle for all-around pretty good special effects throughout rather than amazing inspiring special effects throughout). But there's also, I believe, a lot of unwarranted vulgarity in terms of profanity, sexual content and point-blank shooting. Don't get me wrong, but I thought this would be a more intelligent movie as in planning how to assassinate elusive people and implementing intricate car chase scenes but instead it was all sheer brute and power physical point-blank guns and knives and fist combat. I suppose I was also let down because I also thought there would be a strong story. The story was just as much as you can expect from any other mediocre action flick these days though. Nothing really special. There are a few twists but they weren't good enough to redeem the movie as a whole. I believe the first problem with the movie is that not much is done to help the audience identify with James' character in the beginning...rather than evoking sympathy and seeing true transformation in his character, he is transformed in a superficial twisted way. (Kind of like rather than helping someone with body image or confidence issues realize they ARE beautiful and do deserve respect, because beautiful is not only how the media portrays people, you instead feed into the dissonance by giving them a whole makeover and saying "See, NOW you are a beautiful person worthy of feeling beautiful." It's just a little unnerving.)