Guest Review: "Wanted"

I haven’t had a chance to see Wanted, but was planning on checking it out this week. Based on the following review from guest reviewer Elizabeth Kricfalusi, I might skip it!

Elizabeth writes:

Way back in February, I issued a challenge to readers to go see a movie that they would normally avoid, taking a chance that they just might be pleasantly surprised. I hadn’t gotten around to meeting the challenge myself, despite my other goal this summer of seeing a movie a week. (My experience so far can be summed up as: So Many Great Movies, So Few Weekends…)

But I finally decided I could hold off on seeing War, Inc., the next movie I really want to see, for at least another week and, instead, went to the newly released action-adventure flick, Wanted.

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I’m not normally into major action movies, especially ones that I suspect will have a lot of gratuitous violence in them. (This movie is about assassins so I thought it was a pretty safe bet…) But, like I mentioned in the original challenge, there are always movies that transcend their genres, and I loved both Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects, which weren’t exactly Disney-esque. And I had some hope that Wanted might fall into that category as well, for a few reasons:

• While I try to avoid reading reviews before seeing a film, I had been hearing some general good buzz about the movie.
• I think Angelina Jolie is a pretty good actor and Morgan Freeman is a great one, so I figured they could help elevate the film.
• I had seen James McAvoy interviewed on The Daily Show earlier this week and thought he was a total doll, so I figured just watching him for a couple of hours couldn’t be all THAT bad! (Funnily enough, I have never seen him in a movie before, even though he’s been in two that I did actually want to see: Atonement and The Last King of Scotland.)

So how was it? Well, the question should really be, how DUMB was it? And the answer: EXTRAORDINARILY DUMB!

Man, was this a BAD movie. First of all, there wasn’t a single likeable character in it. McAvoy’s Wesley Gibson started out as an annoying doormat and ended up as an annoying cold-hearted bastard.

Then there was the “plot.” I can deal with a certain amount of holes in logic in the name of fun and/or excitement, but this was definitely the swiss cheese of storylines.

Now, based on the raves I gave to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the fact that one of my all-time favorite TV shows was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I think it’s also safe to say I have a pretty healthy ability to suspend disbelief when it comes to over-the-top action scenes. But the car-chasin’, pistol-packin’, knife-wieldin’, rat-explodin’ sequences in Wanted were SO over the top, rolling my eyes just wouldn’t do the implausibility justice. I’d have to throw in my shoulders, hips, and ankles to even begin to come close to expressing how unbelievably ridiculous they were…

Did I mention the exploding rats?

To sum up, I hated this movie. HATED IT. So does that mean I’ll never go to another one that looks like it might not be exactly my cup of tea? No way. Because you never know when you might find a real treasure, the kind that makes lines like “You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?… A Royale with Cheese,” and “Who is Keyser Soze?” stick with you more than a decade later.

A movie buff can dream, can’t she…?

Images: Wanted, Universal Pictures, 2008