Wanted (review)

Nineteen ninety-nine was a good year for films, not least of which were Fight Club and The Matrix. Evidently it took nine years for Timur Bekmambetov to go all the way from watching these inspirational films to finally releasing his own imitation of them. I couldn't get more than a few minutes into Wanted before I got a feeling of déjà vu. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy...

As far as orthodox Hollywood films go, I can't really fault Wanted. I don't know how faithful the movie is to the original comic, but the screenplay writers strictly followed the monomyth to good effect. It's great fun to identify with a character who goes from being a corporate drone to becoming a member of an elite secret club, discovering along the way that he'd been destined for greater things all along. The overall message of empowerment, of taking back control of your life, certainly has to be a good thing, as inspirational as it is entertaining.

Although Wanted is nowhere near as good as the films that inspired it, it's still a fun story in its own right, complete with its own interesting twists and turns. However, the basic premise of the film is so silly that I spent all my mental effort trying to suspend my disbelief, leaving me with very little brainpower left over to actually enjoy the film. I'm going to spoil some of the plot now, so if stylised violent action films are your thing, you should probably go and watch it before I rip it to shreds. Go ahead, I'll wait.

It's my belief that Hollywood performs one of the main functions of religions much better than the original religions themselves do, namely to inspire people with stories of fictional characters who fight for what's right, overcoming the odds -- and their own self doubt -- to thwart evil, growing as people along the way. The monomyth, as told by countless Hollywood films, goes as far as to take the essence of countless cultures' stories and use that skeleton as the basis of new stories, fleshed out in novel and interesting ways. Thanks to the work of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler, the essence of what makes a story popular has been well articulated.

However, I think that although the monomyth is great for things like pacing a story, the writers of Wanted took the whole religious aspect of it a little too literally. The two scenes that let this film down are the training and backstory exposition scenes, and the problem isn't one of pausing the action for a bit. The actual original ideas that make this film unique are the idea that some monotheistic god talks to someone via binary encoded messages hidden in the seemingly innocuous mistakes of a loom -- yes, a weaving loom -- and the idea that you can shoot bullets in a horizontal curve.

I'm all in favour of using drugs or psychotic delusions to create works of entertainment. I love the stories of the undoubtedly temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia influenced writer Philip K. Dick. Even if I can suspend my disbelief for films like Scanners and The Truman Show, though, there comes a point where you just think that no, there's no way this character can be anything other than plain crazy. This works well with films like Donnie Darko where that's half the point, but Wanted makes the mistake of presenting its arbitrary schizophrenic plot as both being true and also as being a serious matter.

Some kind of all-seeing deity, whose power is impotent enough to warrant sending humans to do his or her dirty work, really is meant to be talking to the mentor character via the medium of slightly imperfect weaving.

Yes, weaving.

Why not use a more obvious medium that someone would discover even if he wasn't predisposed towards looking for a pattern where none exists? Such as sending a telegram? Speaking in elaborate, subtle codes that are commonly misconceived as background noise is only a viable medium for fictional gods (see The Bible Code), not real ones.

I caved in and freezeframed the loom scene, confirming that the secret code is, in fact, ASCII. On an interesting sidenote to hackers, it seems that this infallible god has no need of error correction, merely padding out the seven bits per letter with a leading zero. (Apparently this loom is an eight-bit system.) Curiously, despite using ASCII for a thousand years before its invention in nineteen sixty-three, this god nevertheless shuns its fancy modern advantages such as punctuation, spaces, and lower case letters. I can't say I'm surprised, as gods are notorious for being luddites, which seems appropriate given the loom motif.

Even with my limited knowledge of the sciences, I also find it impossible to entertain the notion that the rules of physics only apply because "people believe in them," which is essentially the other message of this film. The first Matrix film gets away with this only because it's set in a simulation where the rules of physics don't apply, not the reality that's been pretty well understood since Isaac Newton's time, let alone Samuel Colt's.

Other than these bizarre, arbitrary ideas, this film's pretty good. A little violent at times, although nowhere near as over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek as the previous year's Shoot 'Em Up, which is a shame. It even seems to rip off a joke from its spiritual predecessor. (Unfortunately for Wanted, the joke worked a lot better in the original film. Take note: if you're going to steal an idea, you should improve it.)

There's even a vague mention of order versus chaos, a motif which is explored much more fully in next month's embarrassingly superior blockbuster The Dark Knight.

In short, this is a fun film if you're in the mood for watching people shoot at each other in increasingly implausible ways, but make sure you turn your brain off on the way in.