I went to see Wanted the other day. I have to say, I’m not convinced. I expected cool special effects and mindless entertainment, and that’s what I got. But apparantly, I have to recheck my ability to turn my brain off, because it so didn’t work with this movie…

[THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS THROUGHOUT!]

(Minor disclaimer: I haven’t read or even seen the comic.)

Sooo, where should I start? I’m still somehow at a loss of words. Maybe I should do it like my conversation with B., who went to see it with me. The credits started to roll and we looked at each other kind of waiting for the other person to deliver a verdict. Finally, I said, “I need a bit more time” and started to just give her my thoughts.

I was entertained, no doubt about it. Even though it could have been half an hour (or so) shorter, I mostly wasn’t bored.

The special effects were good, but a bit repetitive. Timur Bekmambetov loves himself some somersaulting cars (see Night Watch), but it’s done a bit too much…
Then the slow motion and the pulsating view thing… Fine, at least, it illustrated a point.

The bending bullets thingy, I’m fine with (somebody with more sense of physics might just have a minor stroke here), it even made sense. The last scene, where Angelina Jolie‘s Fox shoots everyone in a circle and then herself, that went a bit too far, though… a) they aren’t all the same height. Yet, the bullet hits everybody exactly in the temple and b) friction? I mean, this bullet has to get slower and I doubt it that it could actually make holes in ten (or so) heads without too much speed loss to still be effective…

But she looked really pretty…

The twist was no twist. Come on, when Cross (Thomas Kretschmann, HAWT bitch) said in the first scene [basically the first sentence he spoke at all], “You have broken the code”, it was clear that he was the good guy.
And that they wouldn’t make it a decision between family/tradition and ethics, was clear by all the emotional depth this movie mastered, so it came to no surprise that the good guy turned out to be the father of the hero…

Also, Wesley (James McAvoy) must be a bit slow… I mean, he’s hanging out of a train and almost falls to his death, when his apparent mortal enemy saves him. Instead of stopping for a moment, to think, “huh? Why does he save me? What’s going on?”, he shoots him right away. Which is not only stupid itself, it’s even more stupid, when you shoot the only thing/person that’s keeping you from falling to your death. Practicality, people! You let yourself be pulled into the train and THEN you shoot the other guy!

The exploding rats… how long does it take to equip a truckload of rats with wristwatches, alone? Years? At least months… Perfect weapon my ass… when a fraternity of super assassins is hunting you, time is of the essence. And good hiding, but that’s a different story. And then the rats hardly killed anyone.

But at least, it enabled one of the coolest killing sprees I have ever seen, especially with all the weapons taken from the killed. Brilliant.

This was also a brilliant looking scene…

The training program was a bit weird, wasn’t it? I mean, training someone by beating him up repeatedly, only interrupted by almost drowning him in some kind of healing wax? That’s not really training, now, is it? Just because his adrenaline is higher, doesn’t mean he knows how to do everything without the least guidance.

And the long distance shots? I mean, looking cool, especially the second one, where the bullet flies through the donut and stuff, but people, please… that’s really, really stretching it. I mean, that must be about 5 km (~3.5 miles) in a straight line, but these bullets kept going round corners. And what if there’s only one person in the way, moving not as you anticipated it? That happens, you know?

Well, but the thing that just didn’t work for me, was the Fraternity itself.

First off, let’s start with the whole “kill one, save a thousand” thing… We could enter a long discussion about the ethics or lack of ethics of that, but what I want to point out is the train: If you actually respect human life and want to save it, then stop shooting in a train, driving cars into it and ultimately derailing it and killing hundreds of innocent people.

And then, the invisible weaver… or maybe I should capitalise that, The Invisbele Weaver (TIW). A secret code in a piece of cloth that is woven by a machine, which is instructed by fate or TIW… An all-knowing thing, whose intention it is to maintain the balance by killing people. Served by an elite group of assassins.

Please, draw your own religious analogy here.

The thing is, this sect of TIW admirers base their whole life on a ludicrous assumption. [Like Religion.] Then they get told that there leader has lied to them all along – and they believe it, more or less without a problem. Then their leader, who has been lying to them all the time, tells them some other things – and again, they believe it right away. And then they’re all dead. But if they hadn’t died, I bet they would have believed anything you told them.

My problem may be that I’m just not the gullible religious type and I don’t get the gullible religious type. Maybe countless people will start commenting that they would have believed it and that’s just normal human behaviour. To quote the big philosopher W.: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… shame on you, too.

And the explanation Fox gives Wesley, who dares to doubt the whole thing… come on! Just because it worked once, doesn’t mean it works all the time. But it’s not like a guy without a backbone like Wesley, suddenly grows one overnight…

Although, that’s pretty much the story.

So, summarising: The movie had some nice scenes, but they overdid it. And the religiousness of it all just was the last straw.