Wanted is officially the best live action comic book Hollywood has produced in ages. It loses its grip a bit in the final third but otherwise works on the psyche like those vodka buckets they dispense so freely in Thailand, laced with triple strength Red Bull-- It hits you like a sledgehammer and feels great going down, but try not to think about it too much in the morning.
I remember the days of yore when Americans demanded some degree of realism in their action movies, however spuriously. A friend of mine once complained to me about how Blade sucked because the silver bullets that slew hordes of vampires only wounded an older, stronger vampire. It wasn't realistic, man! This egregious logical mis-step in a film about supernatural creatures who mysteriously regenerate amputated limbs somehow sunk it all for him. But times have changed and now we have Hollywood movies like Wanted that unapologetically catapault into the realm of the fantastic even without any supernatural component.
The plot, for what it's worth, centers on a cubicle drone named Wesley (James McAvoy) who finds himself recruited into an ultra-elite cabal of assassins founded 1000 years ago in order to use their skills to keep the world in balance. (Judging by recent world events, they're doing a shit job, but no matter.) This crew of superhumans tease forth a hidden potential in our worker bee for adrenaline-charged hyper focus and an uncanny ability to curve the trajectory of bullets to mash the brains of his targets. Angelina Jolie has fun playing the curvy killer who guides his speedy transition into master assassin. Apparently a renegade member of this murderous clique has started picking off members one by one and for some reason only our newbie can stop him. All of this plot stuff merely serves as a backdrop for a series of increasingly gravity and logic defying action sequences, which peaks with a train dangling off the side of a cliff with everyone shooting away at each other inside the plunging cabins. (The film hedges here on the issue of collateral damage to the passengers, which is really too bad-- a little wanton carelessness on the issue would've been good for its edge.) The violence remains supremely bone-crunching and nasty throughout and like in Fight Club our hero sheds his quotidian skin and becomes a man not so much by being violent as by showing a bottomless willingness to get beaten to a pulp, as evidenced by the grueling training sequences in which he is punched, kicked, slashed, thrown on moving trains and generally abused.
I saw Wanted in a high end mall today in Hong Kong called IFC. The film was preceded by a preview for Red Cliff, a new film directed by former Hollywood HK expat John Woo. In college, I was infatuated with the increasingly brutal slew of Hong Kong Category III action and horror films that had their moment in the early to mid 90s, reflecting the tremendous anxiety of the people as they prepared for the uncertainties associated with the imminent return of mainland China communist rule. These films were characterized not only by their extreme violence and amorality but also by their audacious visual style and willingness to do anything and to go anywhere for that great image or for that utterly savage bone-crunching thrill, and narrative coherence always took a back seat to the spectacle. Take that seemingly endless tracking shot in Woo's Hard Boiled moving through set piece after set piece and gun battle after gun battle with no cuts of any kind, it's still unbelievable to watch. I connected very strongly with that reckless aesthetic-- anti-intellectual, excessive, mindless, gratuitous, cavalier. But also inventive, dazzling, innovative and often utterly captivating and adrenalizing. My senior year I showed a film clip from the intro to the HK potboiler Naked Killer -- their answer to Basic Instinct -- in which the camera follows a beautiful woman walking alone through a deserted street into an apartment in a voyeuristic handheld point of view shot, a recipe familiar from countless slasher movies in which a sadistic killer stalks and kills a nubile young woman. But then the movie inverts the standard paradigm when the eponymous woman turns around in the shower and brutally assassinates her male stalker, who turns out to have been her target all along. The lesbo prof loved that shit and I landed an "A"-- she ruled! (Ironically, the only film at the HK cinema where I saw Wanted that wore the Category III designation was the insipid new Sex & the City film. Ugh.)
It's taken Hollywood a while to catch up with HK cinema, although it tried early on by importing Yuen Woo-Ping, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark and most famously John Woo with varying degrees of success. Now Woo has returned to HK to make a new film with his old star Tony Leung and I'm in HK for the first time watching a Hollywood film that owes its creative juice to all those HK films I loved when I was in college. Full circle.
