Wanted 7ish/10

My first reaction to reviewing a movie called Wanted is to make some kind of pun on the fact that its called Wanted. Like all I Wanted was a good movie, but instead I got Wanted.


Yeah, so back in the day, like in 2006 or whenever, I remember hearing about this great new comic series that was so great that it was optioned for a movie based solely on its first issue. Well, Alright!

I read the comic, despite the fact that I've never like Mark Millar, the writer, and it turned out to be pretty awful. For anyone that hasn't read it; Eminem plays Edward Norton's character from Fight Club as he bumbles around his shitty day to day life as a office worker guy. Some black chick called The Fox informs our loser hero that he is in fact the son of a super awesome assassin, who has just recently been assassinated himself (which if you ask me doesn't make him all that great of an assassin but whatever.) She asks him to take his place for reasons I can't remember, and the adventure STARTS!

The comic looks cool right? yeah, its not. 

You find out that the dad belonged to a guild of bad guys that killed all the good super hero guys in a secret war... Then the shit monster from Dogma shows up and they all go into alternate universes and whatnot. and. I didn't like it, mostly because the main character pulling the whole "Your life is meaningless, you big wimp, go out and kill people and bleach your hair" got annoying. and the fact that Millar is trying desperately to sound like Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis doesn't help either. But hey, he wrote Civil War and how sweet was that shit right?

So I found out that the movie is just based on the "Son of assassin must become an assassin too" part , and not so much any of the other nonsense, and I thought to myself "cool, assassins!"

Why is this movie called Wanted anyway?

The plot of the movie is similar to the comic book in that Wesley's dad is a assassin for the Fraternity that is killed by a rogue agent named Cross, and Morgen Freeman needs Wesley to take his father's place as the only man that could stop him, even though his father couldn't stop him, because cross killed him.

Fox isn't black anymore because Angelina wouldn't change races (what a bitch). But hey Nick Fury is black now, so its kind of even, though not really. Also no shit monster... or anything else from the comic because that stuff all happened after the first issue, and who cares about that shit anyways.

This movie has a lot of guns. I like guns.

After watching the movie I admit that it has its moments. Like the moments when its The Matrix. I don't even know if I should point out the obvious similarities between who is Neo, Trinity, the wise black guy, and so on but the more into the movie I went, the more similarities I found. We find out that these guys are picking their targets based off the code they read from a loom, which is the matrix, and we even start to see the "Bullet Spin" become a movie hook similar to what the "Bullet Time" was in The Matrix. Or maybe I'm just making this up. whatever. By the end General Zod from Superman 2 shows up as the Keymaker and Cross turns out to be Darth Vader.

It took me forever to find this image on Google.

The action wasn't too bad, with their being some cool scenes, mostly the very last one, which was in slow motion, making it less cool in my opinion. There is a scene where Wesley jumps on a car while shooting at Cross that reminded me of a John Woo movie to the point where I Wanted to stop the movie and go watch Hard Boiled. Its followed by a weird scene where Wesley accidentally shots that one rat guy that I figure counts as the mouse character from The Matrix. (because of the mouse/rat connection.) There are a few other shootouts, but most of them turn from cool shootouts to guys curving bullets around each other to have them meet in midair in some kind of fancy Bullet Magic Fighting bullshit stuff which is really more annoying then fun to watch...

Hard Boiled is awesome.

I don't even get where the bullet curve stuff got to be such a big deal from. I think there was a scene in the comic where he curves a bullet, but it was just one scene and there were also super heroes and other crazy shit. In fact part of me thinks the writers were so blown away by the bullet curving scene in the comic that they made this movie so they could fill it with all their bullet curving glory.

Its like a Tiger or something...

Some of the negatives include some really flat characters, weird dialog, nonsense story, and the fact that every scene takes place on or by a moving train. Why so many trains you might ask the movie. Because shut up, who doesn't love trains?

We get to see some(a lot) of transient speed shots (where it slows down and is like WAAAAMMM, and then speeds back up again), which as mentioned, is annoying and some expensive looking fx shots of the words "Fuck You" spelled out with a tooth as the "u".

This is how the movie feels about you.

I was also upset when Common died for whatever reason. Probably because I don't even know who is he in the movie, or because I can't think of a Martix parallel for him, but really why would you kill common? He was just standing around appearing to be in deep thought. whats the point of killing him... or even having him in the movie?

The saddest line from Terminator 2 :(

In the end, yeah the plot makes no sense, and the characters are hard to care about, but any movie that lets you see Angelina's ass AND get multiple scenes of Morgan Freeman cussing his mouth off before getting shot in the head can't be that bad. For real though, how cool is a close up of Morgan Freeman catching a bullet in the face?

kind of cool...

War, Inc. 3/10

Wow, what a weird movie.
I liked Grosse Point Blank. It had hitmen and Dan Aykroyd, and that German song about balloons, and a shootout in a convenient store. And John Cusack was in it. Some people like him...



War, Inc. was supposed to be a kind of spiritual sequel to Grosse Point Blank, or at least I think it was.
Taking place in a fictional Iraq country, Martin Blank is a hitman starting to have doubts about his line of work. Dan Aykroyd shows up on a toilet for some reason, and John Cusack's sister shows up in the same role she played in Grosse Point Blank. The similarities pretty much end there. because this movie sucks.

In this fictional Iraq like country the Tamerlane corporate is looking to have Cusacks character kill some guy for some reason and theres a lot of other weird stuff I don't even feel like explaining; like Cusack talking to a on*star like computer guy, the ruler of the world being a big brother like guy called the Viceroy that talks to the world using mutating images that don't really make sense, and a Tamerlane base that is located in the freezer of a Popeye's chicken.

Hilary Duff  is pretty good looking in it though.

What plays out feels like a Terry Gilliam movie, without his cool surreal visuals, mixed with Mike Judge's Idiocracy. And although it doesn't sound that bad, just imagine all of this happening with John Cusack acting like every character he's ever played and all the weird stuff mixed in in really awkward ways. I guess you could also say it was a live action South Park episode thats four times as long with none of the characters or insight.

Wtf Dan Aykroyd?

I think the main problem with the movie was that its more or less a satire on the current state of war, which might have been interesting back in 2005, but has since become pretty dated material.
I can't think of anything else to say other then don't see it.