Thought Provoking... In the Wrong Way

Rating: 6/10 (13 July 2008)

Wanted is a fairly entertaining action flick that tries to make up for its lack of heart with excessive cosmetic surgery. From the very beginning, it's evident that the makers of the film basically took Fight Club, The Matrix, and various elements of about every successful American action movie ever, threw them in a blender, and tried to make a jagged, gripping concoction. It just ends up being borderline silly, contrived, and very apparently the piece-meal, Frankenstein of action prototypes that it is. It's nowhere near the bar that its predecessors set.
From the beginning, the script plays down to you in a "yeah, I'm Joe Everyguy, the downtrodden anti-hero; you could be me!" sorta way. Most action movies do this subtly and aptly, coaxing the audience into empathy, but with self-pitying lines spouted out of the narrator like "I don't care about anything... The only thing I DO care about is the fact that I don't care about anything," you can't help but shoot the screen a cockeyed look and shake your head.
Atrocious script aside, the well done action sequences do the viewer good. Sure, they're far-fetched, but look, it's a movie. Surely, if any of our favorite action flicks have taught us anything, it's that we should check reality at the door and just let the 90 minutes we pay 10 bucks for provide a single-serving escape from the repetitive drudge that everyday life (and its accompanying laws of physics) enforce. So, I'll let the gratuitous action slide. Some scenes, however, do get a little stupid (ahem, the rooftop scene).
The acting was, on the whole, okay. A little cut and dry; half the cast was under-utilized. I've got a weakness for Jolie, so I'll let the fact that she spoke maybe 6 lines throughout the movie slide. The romance between the lead and Jolie feels underdeveloped and undeserved. You'll say to yourself "you're telling me she fell for THAT dude?" Character development was weak, because it was all focused on the lead, and he's either screaming or whimpering throughout the movie. The plot twists are way guessable, but still welcome.
What really boggles my mind about this movie is how Styrofoam the theme is. Throughout the film, I couldn't ignore the thoughts I had about its superficial message, the implications this movie exposes about our modern culture, and how cheaply the makers try to exploit it. The movie asserts that people will be miserable, dribbling, broken creatures with no sense of ego until some kind of cathartic, surreal cast of characters comes and swoops them away into the fairytale life that they were engineered for; they just didn't know it until a series of remarkable events entirely based around them unfolded. In addition, the point at which the lead really rolls up his sleeves and gets to work is when he fully realizes that his old man was the top assassin in the crew. What? You're telling me that the kid was waiting for a precedent to be set by his father before he could do the work necessary to become successful human being? That doesn't sound like much of a hero, anti- or otherwise, to me.
This theme just plays to people's common expectation of entitlement. "Yeah, I'll just lead a meaningless and trite life until an attractive broad in a Viper abducts me at gunpoint to reveal my true purpose." My advice? Don't hold your breath.
The film ends with the lead breaking the fourth wall and asking the audience, "what the **** have you done lately?" No, no, no, what the **** have YOU done lately, Wesley? So Morgan Freeman and his cast of cronies show up and beat some superpower into you, and then you make the "tough" decision of turning against them to avenge your dad. BFD. A quarter of the audience would have no problem doing that, except with 75% less sap and better one liners.
The most frustrating thing about this movie is that it could've been excellent with a couple of well thought out modifications.