Wanted by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones is about immorality and having fun with it. A young nobody is thrust into a world of supervillains who do what they want, when they want and he proceeds to kill everything that moves in order to get his way and continue to do what he wants.
There is no hero, everyone is narcissistic and it is all done with bad taste and a visceral urge for wanton delight in base individual expression.
Some people understandably detest Millar's adrenaline focused lack of complexity or heart. I thought it was a fun romp.
Wanted starring James McAoy and a mainly silent Angelina Jolie, begins with the same idea of a nobody thrust into a secret world and forced to use the power within him to seek vengeance and take his birthright.
There are differences...
1) No supervillains. That would need a large budget. Instead the secret world is that of a society of assassins called The Fraternity. A thousand year-old sect that was created by weavers in order to...
I'm sorry my brain shut down when I thought that I wrote that a deadly society of weavers...
Sigh, there I go again.
2) The assassins don't kill people because they are powerful and can do whatever they want. Oh no, these are nice assassins who only kill people who will do bad things. Like assassins perhaps.
3) The assassins can bend gunshots around corners, jump across buildings like Neo on his second try and see things no-one else can. They can do this because they have an elevated heart rate. At first this may not seem to make sense but that is just because of logic and these bullet effects cost money dammit!
4) Angelina Jolie has a nice arse. You see it. I think it actually has more lines of dialogue than she does if the tattoos are counted.
5) Now for this one you need to sit down. No really, take in the full comfort of that leatherette computer chair you are seated in if you are lucky, the haemmorroid inducing torture device on wheels if you are not.
Ok here we go.
The Fraternity is given their assignments by The Loom of Fate.
The Loom of Fate.
Say it again, roll it off the tongue, let it permeate your mind so when you see the film you don't worry yourself in thinking "Ermm did my brain just have an aneurism and cause me to think someone just said he gets told who to kill by The Loom of Fate?"
It is ok seeker of truth. He really did just say that the threads on top are 1s and the threads underneath are 0s. Which spell out the wishes of The Loom of Fate.
There's Morgan Freeman shooting his agent in front of The Loom of Fate. He had to shoot him because The Loom of Fate weaved together a binary code that had his name on it, that and Morgan Freeman figures that this is the last time he'll take the cash before reading a script that has anything as monumentally idiotic as The Loom of Fate in it.
He doesn't even bother bending the bullet around the unintended comedy.
There are some very fun scenes in this film, some well constructed action scenes and McAvoy does a decent job even if his American accent slips more often than a drunk camel on ice.
But it tries to make Wesley a hero. He isn't one. It takes the idea of the original comic, waters it down to make it inoffensive and then discovers there's no point, as being offensive is pretty much the whole idea.
Then it throws in The Loom of Fate.
