Way Too Late Movie Review – "Wanted"

I have a really bad habit of letting my Netflix movies sit on top of my television for months before I finally get around to watching them. I think it has something to do with having to find a two hour block of time in which I can watch the movie with no distractions, which in this crazy modern workaday world can be hard enough as it is. But when the movie is something that I added to my Netflix queue months prior when the movie was out in theaters, and by the time I receive it I can barely remember why I was interested in it in the first place, it’s also hard to find the desire to set aside that two hours, even when I do have the time. The ironic thing is that when I finally watch the movie, I almost always enjoy it, so you’d think I’d learn from my experience that I’m pretty good at picking movies for myself, being that I am myself. The side effect of this process is that by the time I’ve seen a movie, it’s too late to be able to talk to anyone about it. So I’ve decided that this forum is the perfect place to share my thoughts about these movies, that you’ve either already seen eons ago, or had no desire to see and are thus not interested in the least. And with that rousing introduction, onto my first review.

Wanted


I remember thinking when I added this to my queue that this looked like a fun shoot ‘em up, and Angelina Jolie looked pretty hot, and on those two fronts this movie certainly did not disappoint. What I didn’t expect, and was pleasantly surprised by, was the main character’s story arc. In the vain of movies like "The Matrix" or "Harry Potter", "Wanted" is a movie about an ordinary man who learns that he has extraordinary abilities, and that he is destined to lead another life, a more meaningful and exciting life. It’s the old adolescent fantasy that you’re destined for more than this one horse town, and someday your real parents, James Bond and Lara Croft, will swoop in and take you away from all of this. Sure, it’s a little immature, but it’s good to indulge your inner child once in a while. After all, isn’t indulging in fantasy what movies are really about.

Wesley Gibson is in ordinary man, so ordinary in fact that he can’t bring himself to care about anything in his life. His job is awful, his boss is an evil shrew who constantly berates and belittles him, his girlfriend is an emasculating bitch who is boning his best friend, and his best friend is a posturing macho asshole. So when he’s kidnapped by Angelina Jolie and led through an elaborate gun fight and car chase which ends in the revelation that his father was an assassin and that he shares the same preternatural gift for adrenaline fueled gun violence, he first can’t believe it. But when he tries to go back to his normal life, he finally snaps. He tells off his boss so perfectly, that the humiliation renders her nearly catatonic. He cracks his best friend in the face with his keyboard, knocking out a tooth and spelling ‘Fuck You’ in midair with the broken keys. This scene alone makes this movie worth it for me. Maybe I’m projecting my own dark, twisted, work-related stress fueled fantasy onto this, but I’m okay with that.

While Wesley trains he learns about the Fraternity, a group of assassins that have existed for a thousand years and who receive their orders from a loom. They are weapons of fate, killing to make the world a better place. They train Wesley because they believe that he is the only one who can kill his father’s killer, a former member of the Fraternity who has left and is now seeking to destroy the group. But once Wesley is finally ready and goes after the man, the movie takes a twist.

(Spoilers ahead. Honestly though, if you haven’t seen the movie by now you’re probably not going to.)

The man that Wesley has been sent to kill is actually his father. He left the Fraternity when he learned that the boss, Morgan Freeman, was no longer taking the targets from the magic loom, but picking them himself for profit. Yes, the shocking twist is that this group of professional killers are actually the bad guys. Whoda thunk, right? Wesley decides to go after the Fraternity, sending a horde of exploding rats into the building. The rats explode, but do surprising little damage. Wesley then spends the next ten minutes killing everyone in sight on his way up to get Morgan Freeman. He’s cornered in the end, so he tells all of the assassins the truth about their boss, that he’s been making up the target list. Morgan Freeman admits it, and tells the assassins that all of their names have come up on the loom, so if they want fate in charge then they should all kill themselves. Angelina Jolie, the good assassin, saves Wesley by curving a bullet all the way around the room, killing all of the assassins, including herself. It’s a good thing they were all standing in a perfect circle. Which is kind of dumb when you think about it, if they had opened fire on Wesley they all would have been killed in the crossfire. Wesley does win in the end when he manages to kill Morgan Freeman with a sniper shot from about ten miles away that actually travels through the hole in a doughnut at one point. But hey, I’m not going to start attacking a movie that bends bullets for realism. I might as well start attacking "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" on the grounds that Chinese people can’t fly (or can they?).

So what’s the lesson of this movie? If you life sucks, you need to take matters into your own hands to fix it. Take responsibility for figuring out who you really are instead of just trudging through existence on auto-pilot, waiting for something to happen. Maybe the lesson is that morality is in the eye of the beholder. Or that fate is just an excuse to absolve you of personal responsibility. We all make our own fate. Or maybe, just maybe, the lesson is that gun fights are cool and Angelina Jolie is hot and you get to see her ass. Honestly, what more do you want out of a movie?

My Netflix Rating: 4 out of 5 stars