How does one justify liking a movie that is, more often than not, incoherent on its own terms? That pretty consistently lacks any character that you give a good damn for? That has visuals that blur vision and defy reality, physics, and even the norms of acceptable behavior?
Well, why bother? For reasons not quite within my comprehension, I actually enjoyed Wanted. Part of it was, no doubt, due to the director Timur Bekmambetov, who also did Night Watch and Day Watch, another pair of guilty pleasures. Those movies are also pretty incoherent, yet embrace a certain poignancy that makes all the noise worth the effort. Wanted hasn't got the poignancy, and yet...
The setup is fairly straight-forward. There exists a group known as The Fraternity of Assassins. They've been around for over a thousand years, initially as a band of weavers. Over the centuries they have been engaging in a series of selective assassinations, killing those who are designated to die. How are they chosen? By -- and I love this -- the Loom of Fate.
This is awesomely ridiculous! As the loom weaves a tapestry, it occasionally makes a tiny error. How the threads are mislaid creates a binary code. That code, in turn, names targets, and off the members of The Fraternity go, following the orders of Fate itself. Or are they? You have to have a question like that or else what's a plot for?
The film begins with a fairly horrible voice-over narration by our main character, played by James McAvoy. McAvoy is stuck in a job that defines "horrific dead end" and his salvation is his discovering that he's the son of the greatest assassin The Fraternity has ever had. Now The Fraternity needs him because he just might be the only one capable of killing his father's killer.
His "recruiter" is Angelina Jolie, who tosses aside her Lara Croft accent and almost avoids utilizing her signature slinking about advancing behavior. Almost. She introduces Morgan Freeman, the leader of The Fraternity, the man who reads the fabric spun by the Loom of Fate, and thus the man who issues the orders. McAvoy opts to quit his crappy job in spectacular fashion, including smashing his "best friend" in the face with a computer keyboard. In a typical Bekmambetov flourish, the keyboard shatters with broken letters spelling in the air just what it is that McAvoy is saying to his friend: "F*ck you." That final "u," by the way, is a bloody upside-down tooth.
McAvoy's training is incoherent. It consists mostly of his being beaten to a pulp, slashed with knives, and spending hours in some sort of healing wax so he can start all over again the next day, good as new, right as rain. Somehow as a result of all this sado-masochistic behavior he becomes a superb gunfighter, one capable of curving bullets, a process that allows him to hit a target that is behind an obstruction. This curving is The Fraternity's signature move, something you get to see over and over. And over. And over. Again. And again.
There's no reason for me to like this film, or even recommend it. Writing about its characters and plot almost mandates adding the word "stupid" in every other phrase. By any objective measure, it is Hitman bad. And yet, I was hooked. I meant to watch just a little bit and, instead, stayed up way too late to finish the entire film. Come to think of it, the same thing happened when I watched the DVD of Hitman. Damnitall....
Maybe it was the Danny Elfman song, "The Little Things," that you first hear on the DVD's menu screen:
Have you heard the news?
Bad things come in twos.
But I never knew
About the little things.
(I miss Oingo Boingo.)
Or maybe it was David O'Hara, the first member of The Fraternity that we meet. That guy is all sorts of inherent evil and his gravelly voice is a thing of wonder. God forgive me, but I pretty much said, "Well, sure, of course," when he took out a team of snipers by jumping out a skyscraper window, flying across blocks of intervening space, and casually knocking off the snipers one by one with a pair of pistols, perfect headshots at hundreds of yards.
Ah yes, Bekmambetov continues his cinematic love affair with truly wild physical action. Maybe that was the hook, because this director simply refuses to accept any notion that physics actually exists. For instance, in Day Watch he gleefully had a sports car drive up the side of an apartment complex, then flip sideways so it could park in someone's living room. Here, just as an example, he has a passenger train derail on a canyon bridge. Can a string of train cars hang together like that? Does a canyon of such awesome gloom and doom really exist anywhere in Europe?
The answers are "no" and "probably not," and I don't care. It's an awesome set-piece, and that's Bekmambetov's gift. Sure he's using every special effects tool in the book, but he handles them all exceptionally well. For comparison, in the Matrix films the use of CGI kept killing my willful suspension of disbelief. In Bekmambetov's films he's probably using just as much, or more, CGI but he assembles it in such a way that it feels incredibly possible and real. Your brain is saying (screaming, actually), "No way, no way, no way!" but your gut is digging the ride.
By most any objective measure, Wanted is train wreck bad, which might be apt. The film moves like a runaway freight train. Mindless, it never pauses to consider why its charging headlong down this track, it just is. But like a train wreck, it is engrossing on its own (fluid) terms. Relentlessly bloody, unapologetically brutal, it is also unabashedly and joyously physical.
Now excuse me, I need to see if I can get the hang of this "curve" thing.
Comments