Torture Porn Lite - from Butcher Shop Hollywood

Rating: 4/10 (20 July 2008)

I left this film shaking my head in disgust at the worthless, corrupt and ethically-bankrupt sewer that Hollywood has become. I knew I was going to a violent action film, I knew its story was about assassins, and I am neither religious nor squeamish about screen violence when it serves a good story - but I did not agree to have my face rubbed in corpses of little old ladies impaled on meat hooks and used as firing range targets; in geysers of blood, bone, brains and random gore spurting in extreme close-up and slo-mo from the craniums of Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie and 48 for 50 minor others, then repeated in reverse.
Hollywood is sick. It is so devoid of able writers that it's reduced to serving up buckets of gratuitous, graphic gore and human atrocities sufficient to nauseate Josef Mengele, so as to fill that gaping void where a coherent story and, more importantly, a civilized code of ethics, ought to be.
In yet another of Hollywood's weird adolescent-type cries for help, this film is yet another packed with gratuitous, Beavis & Butthead-caliber profanity between every fourth or fifth word of dialog. It's that thing where teenagers think that grown-up-type "bad words" will impress all observers into "ooohs" and "aaaahs" and thereby obscure desperately-concealed deficiencies of character. Or maybe these "writers" assume their presumptive audience will be just as juvenile as they. Rather pathetic in any case, now epidemic in Hollyweird. Again, I am specifically *not* a WCTU-type religious fundamentalist - but it doesn't take much mental effort to understand the contempt for humanity and the impotent frustration with life that are implicit to gratuitous profanity. To hear actors of the caliber of Morgan Freeman agreeing to deliver that pathetic tripe is just painful.
On the plus side, there were some excellent action sequences and enjoyable spectacle - the train derailment sequence and the car chases managed to be original, even balletic. None of the action in this film was plausible in context of basic physics, of course, but the film managed to suspend disbelief adequately to compensate.
Unfortunately, along with the wall-to-wall human butchery and pottymouth dialog, the story never rose above lame and sloppy. The intrigue of a "secret order" was quickly abandoned as a mere detail of setting; the "Loom of Fate" apparently ran itself, since no explanation was given as to who or what set it in motion; the actors almost to a one were mere foils for extravagant and, again, atrocious visuals.
I won't even bother to go into the contemptible "Sling Blade" ethic of "Murder is A-OK if you have a good reason." Suffice it to stand as a stark reminder of where Hollywood's proctological worldview has inevitably taken it.
Bottom line: "Wanted" is a film that left me feeling in equal parts annoyance, disappointment, and an overpowering desire to go home and wash.