Bending bullets
About ten minutes into “Wanted,” I realized I wanted out. Sadly the one novel concept from Mark Millar’s original comic book series—bending a bullet’s path with equal parts telepathy and slider pitch—wore quickly, while the rest of the movie flirted with the line separating derivation and plagiarism.
As the story goes, one fortuitous day led a fraternity of weavers-turned-assassins to discover binary kill orders woven into their cloth. So far, so good (if a tad hokey). A few hundred years and one sex kitten (Angelina Jolie, in top form) later, The Fraternity still takes its orders from a magic loom, but have developed a host of tricks to train themselves and kill the bad guys, and this is where post-”Matrix” moviegoers will start to squirm.
Virtually no bullet, let alone gun sequence in “Wanted” escapes the now ubiquitous treatment of slow down, stop, reverse, pan, dissect, rotate: the Wachowski brothers had nothing on this (except originality). Every conceivable way of viewing a bullet in flight is exploited here, making “Wanted” come off as slow-motion pornography for the ammunition inclined. Did I mention some of these bullets even unsheathe mid-flight? Hot.
“Star Wars,” too, makes an appearance. Apparently Han Solo in a chic casing of carbonite is just the look director Timur Bekmambetov was going for when he concocted The Fraternity’s uncannily similar healing pits.
Not the most egregious swipe (I’ll leave that distinction for the bullet treatment), but certainly one of the strangest, comes when slacker-turned-Golden Boy of Death, Wes (James McAvoy), discovers his father’s penchant for bombs fashioned from live rats; and soon the movie is awash in the critters. Anyone who has seen “The Departed” will instantly recognize the symbolic link, yet I think Ralph from “The Simpsons” said it best: “The rat stands for obviousness.”
Indeed, if one flaw had to be singled out, a lack of subtlety and innovation must be it. This is a movie constantly looking over its shoulder at great cinema gone by, but one which never faces forward to make a mark of its own.
photo credit: Universal Pictures