Rating:

I’ll admit that I’m a bit ignorant when it comes to comics in general (especially since most of my knowledge of superheroes comes from cartoons), but I consider Wanted to be one of the best modern series. The comic tells the story of a Wesley, an ordinary and seemingly unimportant man who discovers he is the heir to a fortune, amassed in the name of evil. His father, whom he has never met, was a super-villainous assassin, who helped rid the world of superheroes and brainwash the common man into thinking they never existed. Under the guise of The Fraternity, super villains secretly rule the world. That is, until Mr. Rictus, one of the men belonging to The Council of Five (who acts as a villainous government), decides he wants to start a mutiny and go public.

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One of the things that makes Wanted work so well is that unlike most comics, the protagonists are completely and utterly amoral, using their powers for egocentric, selfish purposes, rather than to help better the world. It is a completely different beast than most comics out there today. The rogue gallery of characters is the other reason why Wanted is so prolific. They’re completely over the top, on both their appearance and mannerisms. Where else are you going to find a super villain who was once a pillar of the Christian community, only to die for a few seconds and discover there wasn’t an afterlife, thus removing his moral conscious? A character named Fuckwit? Shithead?

To see these characters and the nihilistic nature of the comic realized as a film could have been one of the most startling things every put to celluloid. The producers of Wanted, though, had other ideas.

James McAvoy stars as Wesley, who discovers his father just died at the hands of a rogue assassin named Cross. His anxiety attacks he’s been having his whole life are actually just surges of adrenaline, which enables him to slow down time and, in turn, do things very precisely at high speeds, like shooting the wings off of a fly. Or, at least, thats what Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells Wesley. Deciding he’s had enough of his humdrum life, he decides to join the assassin group, The Fraternity, and train his ass off to face his father’s killer under the guidance of Fox (Angelina Jolie).

I’ll be honest: the change from super villains to assassins really turned me off from the beginning. When I heard about it during pre-production, I was very worried but Mark Millar, the creator of Wanted, gave it his blessing after the ending was rewritten. Millar must hate his fans since his blessing of Timur Bekmambetov’s abomination is as ludicrous as Stephen King renouncing Kubrick’s The Shining.

It’s as if writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas read the first few pages of Wanted, got a feel for the sense of humor and decided they could take it from there. The questions at hand is no longer “What kind of movie would Wanted be if they changed the super villains to assassins?” but “What kind of movie would Wanted be if they only had changed the super villains to assassins?” I guarantee it still would have been terrible but, I’d take that over this film, which is probably the worst adaptation I have ever seen.

Long gone is the amazing gallery of villains and an intricately crafted back story, complete with several epic showdowns. Why include what made the comic so great into the movie? What we’re treated to instead are people with a physical defect that causes their hearts to beat at over 400 BPM and, hands down, the worst plot/exposition device I have ever seen in a movie. What if I told you that the assassins take the names of their hits from a rug loom that spits out binary code in the form of cross stitching? You’re either completely turned off to this movie or you’re searching your welcome mat, desperately looking for the name of your mother-in-law. And if that wasn’t enough, the third act introduces a plot twist so cliche, I think Shyamalan would find it too obvious.

If the action had been fun at the very least, it still could’ve worked as a popcorn movie. But, it manages to get that all wrong too. Sure, Bekmambetov’s style is complimentary to the film, making the action look polished, but the repetitive nature of the violence completely destroy the fun quotient. It makes the slow-motion and freeze frame sequences of last year’s 300 look tame in comparison. I completely understand the need to establish the character’s ability to slow down time but after I see bullets collide in mid-air for the umpteenth time, it’s not entertainment anymore. It’s overkill.

Wanted presents a new breed of comic book movies; ones whose only relation to the source material is the name on the poster. It’s akin to someone making a Spiderman movie about a guy who gets stung by a radioactive spider and fights crime… as a giant spider. If you’re going to make a mindless popcorn movie, make it fun and if you’re going to adapt a comic with a cult following, do more than read the first few pages. But if you want to do it like Wanted, whatever you do, don’t make a sequel.