Wanted: The Geekscape Review

WARNING! SPOILERS ABOUND! <— that should be enough…

There are two ways to handle an adaptation, one of which is right and one of which is wrong. The right way to adapt a story to film is to stay true to the theme and story of the original work. You can tweak the details all you want. Take a few characters out, add a few new ones, change locations, whatever. The fanboys will bitch but as long as you stay true to what the original material is about you will have done your job, and it’s just a fact of life that that stuff needs to happen sometimes to make a book or comic work on film.

The wrong way to adapt something is to completely neglect what the original is about or was trying to say but then try to cover your ass by staying true to some of the details. Unfortunately, this is the route that Wanted went. It’s got dialog and scenes lifted directly from the comic all over the place to remind you that, yes, this is the Wanted you know and love. However, they could not have missed the mark further as far as staying true to the message of the original.

Wanted, as written by Mark Millar, was a comic about breaking out of your mundane, meaningless existence and just giving into your id fully. It was unapologetic, it was brutal, it was amoral, it was nihilistic. It was a book that you want to be repulsed by but somewhere deep inside there was a primal part of you that was cheering with joy.

The movie attempts to take a book about bad guys being bad just because they can, and makes it a movie about good guys being bad because they are trying to make the world a better place. It tries to spread the message of giving into your id and giving a big “fuck you” to the world, but at the same time is apologetic about it. Like a kid throwing a temper tantrum until he accidentally breaks something, then cleaning up the mess while uttering a non-stop stream of “I’m sorry’s”.

The movie also decides to change up the story a bit. The comic revolved around a secret society of super villains that had killed off all of the super heroes and now control the world. The movie is about a secret society of assassins that was started by a group of weavers who get their assassination orders from a secret code imbedded in the thread of cloth woven by the Loom of Fate. I’m not making that up and it is exactly as stupid as it sounds.

At least they kept with the main thread of Wesley Gibson, as played by James McAvoy, being a completely normal, boring, insiginficant person before learning that his father was a bad ass killer and now he has to follow in his father’s footsteps. Kind of. The father is a different person than he is in the comic, and really the whole dynamic is thrown off because of it. You know what, they really didn’t get any aspect of the comic right.

So we’ve got a movie that is a horrible adaptation with an absolutely retarded plot. Case closed, right? Not quite. Despite its many failings, Wanted is one hell of a fun ride.

Director Timur Bekmambetov gained fame by directing the absolutely bat shit crazy Russian flicks Nightwatch and Daywatch, and all the strengths and weaknesses he showed there are present in Wanted. Bekmambetov is all about big ideas and big set pieces. He is a visual artist that wants to show you things you haven’t seen before, and they can be thrilling. Wanted is a series of set pieces strewn together with the weakest of threads. Bekmambetov hasn’t learned to tell a story yet, and I’m not sure he wants to. He wants to show you some cool shit and the story is just the excuse to do that.

If he could manage to be more consistent, Bekmambetov (man that is not a fun name to type) could really be a powerhouse director. As it stands, Wanted is wildly inconsistent in every way. There are moments of visual extravagance and humor but they happen too seldom to ever feel natural. There are times when they go all out with the in your face nihilism from the comic and then moments when they back step and try to be moralistic or dramatic. One scene happens and then the next scene happens and they rarely feel connected. The movie has more montages than a Rocky flick. It’s kind of a mess.

James McAvoy does a decent job in his first big headlining role but the real stars of the show are Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. I’m not the biggest Jolie fan but she really comes off as effortlessly cool here. She’s also charming and manages to be sexy despite her increasing resemblance to Christian Bale in The Machinist. Morgan Freeman is always basically Morgan Freeman, but this was a Morgan Freeman that said “Kill this mothafucka” and could bend bullets and that’s just fun.

So at the end of the day we have a neutered and bastardized version of the comic, a ridiculous plot with more than a few nods to Fight Club and The Matrix, and inconsistent messy filmmaking. But none of that really matters, just turn off your brain and let yourself enjoy watching James McAvoy attack a textile factory with explosive rats. It’s really kind of cool.