Wanted... oooh yeah!

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Got through seeing Wanted last night, planning on just an evening of mental release through gratuitous violence... and it delivered. It was bloody, dirty, often over the top and sometimes ridiculous... and may just be the best movie I've watched all year, and I didn't think you could do much better than Ironman.

Actually, it's hard to compare. This movie defied casual description. My sister's words were, 'Was that really awful or frickin' awesome?'

It was also hilarious, heartbreaking, morbidly imaginative, and had two endings in a way, each better than the last. You also never knew if this was a comedy or dead serious... because it faded from one to the other seamlessly.

There were two parts though that annoyed me, that killed the suspension of disbelief, and could easily have been tweaked.

#1. In the very beginning, one of the assassins manages to run so freakin' fast that as he passes by office doors he stirs up a hurricane of papers, and manages to send himself through a window and then a hundred feet or more to the next building, a jump that Spiderman would have been proud of.

#2. Stop with the bloody shooting of each other's bullets. Maybe do it 'once' for the 'ooooh, YEAH!' factor... but three times in a row it's no longer interesting and you begin to think about how utterly unlikely that is.

[DraPrime]

How good can it be? The greatest action movie of all time (Mad Max 2) has already been made.

[13_CBS]

HAve you read the comic version of it? The film is very roughly based on the comic, which is a miniseries set in a world where supervillains have taken over multiple universes' worth of Earths, and Wesley is the son of the original Killer. His superpower have to do with inhuman weapon handling.

[Muz]

It looked interesting in the previews, but then I started reading about it.

So they REALLY get their orders from a magical loom that tells them who to kill? (REALLY?) And the guy's a super-assassin because the loom-force is strong in his family?

I could probably still enjoy the movie, but I think I'll need to take a bit to shift my estimation on where on the reality spectrum it's set first. (I hadn't realized it was a comic book movie.) :smallsmile:

[Jerthanis]

There were two parts though that annoyed me, that killed the suspension of disbelief, and could easily have been tweaked.

#1. In the very beginning, one of the assassins manages to run so freakin' fast that as he passes by office doors he stirs up a hurricane of papers, and manages to send himself through a window and then a hundred feet or more to the next building, a jump that Spiderman would have been proud of.


The comic book it was based on had pretty much literally a Bizarro ripoff as one of the characters. I heard they were de-emphasizing this in the movie, but the comic was about a world of supervillains who had killed all the worlds' superheroes. Kind of.

[The Vorpal Tribble]

It looked interesting in the previews, but then I started reading about it.

So they REALLY get their orders from a magical loom that tells them who to kill? (REALLY?) And the guy's a super-assassin because the loom-force is strong in his family?

Well, there is a special loom that supposedly is a representation of the 'weave' of humanity and by reading certain patterns you find out the names of those who threaten humanity.

They never say anything more, certainly nothing like a 'loom force' or anything.

[Paragon Badger]

You can't put english on a bullet. :smallannoyed:

MORBOL SAYS GUNS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

It seems... really over-the-top.

[Twin2]

HAve you read the comic version of it? The film is very roughly based on the comic, which is a miniseries set in a world where supervillains have taken over multiple universes' worth of Earths, and Wesley is the son of the original Killer. His superpower have to do with inhuman weapon handling.

I think they only have their earth taken over in the comic. They raid other earths, but stick to their own since the last thing they need is other universes good guys realizing what they did, and laying a group smack down on them.

[Verruckt]

In the comic the kid's dad is essentially Bullseye on crack. The power of "I arbitrarily know how to kill you". The story line was that the villains of the world finally got together and essentially took over the world, and then erased all record of there ever having been anyone with superpowers. Needless to say, Millar is spinning in his not-actually-dead-yet grave.

I will however watch and enjoy the movie a great deal anyway, for the same reason I love 300. Sometimes you just need to turn your brain off and say "Wow, I'd have never thought of showing someone's head explode in that way..."

[tyckspoon]

You can't put english on a bullet. :smallannoyed:


Sure you can. You just need an engraving machine and to make your own cartridges. Still pretty pointless, tho, since you will likely have to write anything on the bullet too small to be easily legible and the stresses working on the bullet in firing and impacting on a target are likely to mangle any writing past legibility.

Edit: Ooh, wait. Considering the movie, you probably mean English as in the pool term for adding spin and other directional influences. :smallsmile: Yeah, that one is impossible.

[TheEmerged]

Edit: Ooh, wait. Considering the movie, you probably mean English as in the pool term for adding spin and other directional influences. :smallsmile: Yeah, that one is impossible.

/humor on
Because all the other stuff that happens in most comics is doable? :smallbiggrin:

[hanzo66]

Read the comic before. Still, this one looks to be good in it's own way.


I do remember that the Wesley in the Millar Comic was essentially Eminem given a blackbelt in gun-fu (that and becoming a mass murderer and rapist for the hell of it). The movie at least can deliver in that there's some fun Over The Top action from what it seems and I like OTP.

[Adumbration]

I went to see it yesterday... I don't know, the action was good, but as I saw on a review, it was pretty much a school-shooter's wet dream, which made it a bit uncomfortable.

[ArmorArmadillo]

Hmmm...I was intrigued by this movie, but I had two hurtles to jump that maybe you could help me through.

1. "Kill one, save a thousand" seems like a compromise of the book's actually villain-protagonists and a really lazy utilitarian moral. Does the mindless wow-violence make it forgivable?

2. Bullet time and improbable shooting tricks...is this just a Matrix rip-off or is there something more there?

[The Vorpal Tribble]

2. Bullet time and improbable shooting tricks...is this just a Matrix rip-off or is there something more there?
There weren't any real shooting tricks in The Matrix. The Matrix was more, to use a quote from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, 'Shoot enough bullets and hope to hit the target.'

[skywalker]

I just saw it tonight. I thought it was a pretty good film. Very, very violent. I also can't get over Morgan Freeman saying the f-word twice :smallbiggrin:.

It's kinda like a less intelligent Fight Club, with zero homoeroticism and guns instead of fists. The twists in the storyline completely surprised me, altho I am very good at saying "Whoa, that surprised me" instead of "Well, I could've expected that..." In the end, it got kinda heroic bloodshed there for a minute.

It was one of the hardest R's I've ever seen in a theater.

I call shenanigans on the bullet curving. But it was fun.

[Tom_Violence]

The trailers make it look truly dreadful to me, while a style that's more annoying than awesome. It sorta comes across as the kind of film that Shoot Em Up could have been if it had been very badly handled. So, how much of an accurate depiction would you say one gets from the trailers?

[kamikasei]

I found it highly entertaining and well worth the ticket price, but it was pretty flawed. I'm quite curious to read the original comics, now, to see how many of the flaws were the result of faithfulness to the source material and how many were new.

The curving bullets thing, I think, was a bit too silly and also overdone. Thing is, it wasn't really that cool. It was just "here is a CG object not obeying the laws of physics". That's not terribly interesting. Extraordinarily skilled gunmen still constrained by the laws of physics (as applied in movies...) would, I think, have been better. (Or, I suppose, give them actual superpowers. That might also have been interesting.)

The gore was overkill. I have nothing against crazy gore in a movie but here the lovingly-animated exploding heads and the like seemed to be an intrusion into a tense action movie from a sillier bloodfest. For that matter, having just as much blood without the slow motion could have been quite effective.

The loom.
So they have this loom. And it outputs names in code - binary code (I'm intrigued by what encoding they used a thousand years ago that can unambiguously spell any name found in America today) - whereby apparently any member of the Fraternity can pick up a scrap of cloth, note down the binary code, and turn that into a name. Hell, a machine could do it quite easily. There was no interpretation required that I could see, just transcription.

So why in the hell would anyone accept Sloan being the only one allowed to see the loom's output or interpret it? It was so blatantly obviously an invitation to abuse and corruption that not only did it telegraph the twist but also made the members of the Fraternity look like idiots.

This is especially an issue at the end when Sloan tells them all that their names came out of the loom. They have no reason to accept his word on this, and they can all check for themselves.

The Fraternity.
The whole we-will-rebuild-you thing came off as pretty shallow. I've seen Fight Club. I've read Illuminatus!. I've been exposed to Zen trite and profound. Punching someone in the face until they tell you what you want to hear is not much of a path to enlightenment. Hell, V for Vendetta did it better.

In general, Wesley's awakening comes off less as "I am a Nietzschean Superman, free of conventional morality and superego; I act as I choose and no other will choose for me" than "I am a guy with a lot of pent-up anger who's traded one set of masters I was too chicken to ever stand up to for another set who I will obey unquestioningly because they let me destroy stuff". It makes some sense if you look at it from Sloan's point of view - the kid's a tool, and instrument to be manipulated, and he's just shaped into what Sloan needs him to be. But the rest of the Fraternity thought he was a genuine new member - which implies this was the sort of process, and the sort of enlightenment, they all went through.

The twist.
I'm surprised I didn't see it coming that Cross was his father, given the physical resemblance. In my defense, I think it may have been partly that it was a crap twist. Look at it this way - which plot sounds more interesting:

A young man learns that his missing father was a master assassin, working for a shadowy group of manipulators, and that he's just been killed by a renegade. Taking up his father's mantle, he confronts the renegade only to learn that it's the renegade who's in the right and his father and the rest of the organization who must be stopped. He joins his father's killer to stand against the organization for the sake of the ideals he holds and for his own sense of justice - truly becoming his own man.

vs.

A young man learns that his missing father was a master assassin, working for a shadowy group of manipulators, and that he's just been killed by a renegade. Taking up his father's mantle, he confronts the renegade only to learn that he's been lied to - the renegade is his father, and the organization is evil! His path to self-realization stops short as he lets his father's crusade take over his life and succumbs to the determinism of blood ties.

Or to put it another way: what would Wesley have done if he'd learned that Cross was his father... but also that Sloan hadn't been faking anything, and Cross' name really had come up fair and square, causing Cross to run? What would have won out, blood or obedience to Fate?

Hmmm, that was quite a bit of venting... but I really did like the movie! It just rubbed me the wrong way in a few details, mostly because it tried and failed to do something I'd seen better accomplished in other works.

[Maxymiuk]

I more or less liked the movie, nevertheless, I feel like raising some issues venting complaining.

Amazing teleportation powers.

The whole train scene being as over the top as it was (we can survive falling half a mile because of narrow canyons!) how the HELL did Fox get into the same car as them when she was THREE cars down, in the part of the train that gleefully plunged into the abyss just seconds earlier?

And the rats, outfitted with the latest in digiwatch technology, that somehow lets them spread through an entire textile mill in under a minute.

Sniper scopes do not work that way

I can buy that using your amazing telekinetic powers you can curve a bullet's path towards a target that you can see (or at least make a very good guess at where it is). Both instances when we see a sniper rifle being used however, the path the bullet follows would give the shooter absolutely no indication of where their target is (even assuming that they somehow managed to "key in" the location of their X, how would they know that their mark is standing there RIGHT NOW?).

Run with a what now?

So I'm supposed to believe that the pencilneck has Superstrength too? I'm referring, of course, to the textile mill run sequence, where Wesley shoots The Mechanic, grabs his body, and continues running full tilt, dragging it in front of him as mobile cover, and effortlessly turning it this way and that to shoot people through the hole in the skull.

EVEN JOHN McCLANE SHOWS SOME STRAIN WHEN LUGGING BODIES AROUND!

I think I'm done. As I said, I liked the movie in the "hurr, hurr, cool fight scenes" way, but the above examples took willing suspension of disbelief and piledived it into Mordor from the back of an EVA unit piloted by Rainbow Brite.

[Gungnir]

It sounds like Shoot-Em Up, but with reversed proportions of satire and over-the-top action.

[H. Zee]

2. Bullet time and improbable shooting tricks...is this just a Matrix rip-off or is there something more there?

Arrgh! It really ticks me off when people say this type of thing. It's like saying that every martial arts movie ever is a shameless rip-off of Enter the Dragon. Just because one movie has done it, doesn't mean that no other movie can ever do anything vaguely similar, or otherwise the film industry would be long dead.

Back on topic - haven't seen Wanted yet, but I'm going to go see it tomorrow night. :smallsmile:

[skywalker]

The trailers make it look truly dreadful to me, while a style that's more annoying than awesome. It sorta comes across as the kind of film that Shoot Em Up could have been if it had been very badly handled. So, how much of an accurate depiction would you say one gets from the trailers?

Very poorly.

I was expecting something along the lines of Triple X: Guy trades normal job for being an assassin, learning cool skills(moment where movie tells you to say "Whoa, cool." Then, guy is outfitted with cool, over the top arsenal (moment where movie tells you to say "Whoa, cool.") Guy, after much waiting and rejection and becoming a badass, gets to sleep with Angelina Jolie. (Movie makes all guys in audience say "I wish I was him") Finally, movie has incredibly over the top end fight scene on a train (Whoa, cool...)

I have to say I went in expecting a completely different movie than the one I saw. And a lot of people are saying that.

[Tom_Violence]

Arrgh! It really ticks me off when people say this type of thing. It's like saying that every martial arts movie ever is a shameless rip-off of Enter the Dragon. Just because one movie has done it, doesn't mean that no other movie can ever do anything vaguely similar, or otherwise the film industry would be long dead.

I would generally agree with you, but I think in the case of The Matrix the bullet-time effect was so stylised, so pronounced, and just generally so well done that it really became "The Matrix's thing". I also think that there was genuinely no shortage of cheap crappy films released soon after that definitely wanted to jump on the bandwagon.


Very poorly.

I was expecting something along the lines of Triple X: Guy trades normal job for being an assassin, learning cool skills(moment where movie tells you to say "Whoa, cool." Then, guy is outfitted with cool, over the top arsenal (moment where movie tells you to say "Whoa, cool.") Guy, after much waiting and rejection and becoming a badass, gets to sleep with Angelina Jolie. (Movie makes all guys in audience say "I wish I was him") Finally, movie has incredibly over the top end fight scene on a train (Whoa, cool...)

I have to say I went in expecting a completely different movie than the one I saw. And a lot of people are saying that.

Interesting. I may have to go view it sometime. Though it might be a bit too much of a struggle to pretend that McAvoy is a completely different person since I am sick to death of seeing him on screen. He seems to be in literally everything these days!

[Teh_Doon]

I couldn't stand Wanted. As I watched the movie and saw the beauty of what that comic had been ripped up and destroyed and then shoved into a mold of a normal, even common action movie. The story making was slip shod and it was a little bit, I mean a lot of bit, stupid. Curving bullets? Rictus being an ally? Wesley was a follower not his own man, the wohole training montage was poorly done; this is a black story, what's up with Wes grabbing a flag off a train and screaming "yes!" like a little 8 year old with ribbons in her hair hanging off the front of a boat enjoying the wind. I was just very sad with what could have been an amazing bit of cinema. They had a chance to change pretty much everything about action movies. When has the multi-verse hit the big screen? But instead they gave us a cookie-cutter eased for the masses piece of hackwork that attempted to be held together by big name movie stars.