(Be Advised - SPOILERS)
"Wanted" is a film you really shouldn't like or tolerate, but it's really too goofy and stylized to give much to react to. Sure, the opening few minutes has six humans getting bullets through their heads, some in slow motion with beautiful hand crafted chunks of metal. And sure, there's probably 50 or so deaths to follow, including several ordered by an elaborate sweater-making machine. But it's all so ridiculous and odd and well done that it's hard not to at least wink at. Plus, if you were at all a nerdy, picked on 13 year old boy, the wet-dream fantasy of it is hard to put away with smug adult rationalizations.
I mean, who wouldn't want to be picked up by a uber sexy femme fatale, included in a fraternity (I never got to be in a fraternity, and the one party I ever attended at a frat house, I wore the wrong clothes and got mocked), shown how to fight and shoot cool guns, and then gets to shoot real people because a loom told you to.
That's actually about the whole story, except for the betrayal and final retribution. The structure of the movie is actually exactly that of a typical first-person shooter video game. The protagonist is plucked from his normal, drab life and given an orientation (the training period where you learn the controls and weapons). Then you have a number of unrelated challenges, here, two assassinations. Then you go after the hoards of minions, being the beautifully shot mill shootout. Then the henchmen are taken one by one in protracted fights. And finally the showdown with 'the big boss', being Morgan Freeman. (I'd love to go mano-a-mano with Morgan Freeman.)
If you saw the director's Russian films, Day Watch, etc., you'll remember the odd Hollywood-through-Russian-Eyes aesthetic: slightly muted color palette, stylized camera movements, shifts in speed, and baroque violence. And a physics engine (that's a term from video games, for non-geeks) that's half-way between here and Wiley E. Coyote. Which means, they make an attempt at explaining the magic in terms of physics--the cars form a wedge and he flies in the air; the arm is whipped in a certain way and the bullet curves--but it's basically just to look cool.
But though there are all the elements of a Western Hollywood film, there's still something just odd and foreign about the production. There are all the Hollywood icons, the chases, the wish fulfillment for thirteen year olds, but it's like an early Beatles tune played on a Sitar: there's odd over and under tones even though the melody is the same.
And just like there's a nod to real-world physics, there's a nod to real-world morality. The director strikes me as more sterilized version of Lars von Trier, a man with a masterful sense of film as a technical and stylistic medium, but the moral sense of a pre-adolescent. The morality of "Wanted," like the logic of the story, has to be seen from a certain precious angle, like that sculpture of the impossible box. It's that wire frame box that can't exist because the edges interweave, but when viewed from just the right angle, appears like a living paradox. But you step away just a bit, and the illusion is clear.
There's not much wiggle room in terms of where you stand to view the morality of this film. And the logic has as narrow a perspectival tolerance. Heather brought up the unraveling point that the loom, while it does name names, doesn't tell you what to do with the names. Maybe when Joe Smith is spelled out in binary code of missed stitches, it means go give the man a kiss. Or money. Or love to convert him from his evil ways. How did the interpretation, a 1000 years ago, that you had to kill the loomed-named, how did that triumph? Did the more compassionate weaver have to leave the room to piss during that debate?
Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant, because the director seems to not really care whether you see the illusion of it all--dare I say, threadbare quality?--because the illusion is so obvious within the frame of the film, and the little winks and nods are, um, woven into the tapestry of the film. Like in the big operatic/Matrix-ic factory floor shoot out, there's all these flourishes that play out as, "Gee, isn't this fun?!" The protagonist grabs guns out of the air from dying minions, then shoots a henchman (remember the video game sequence of challenges?) through the head and commences to carry his body as a shield, hanging off the gun that now is embedded in his head, and shoots other minions as he continues to run through the battle. Now that is, well, gross, but totally cool!
Then end has our protagonist being neither the Mariner nor the Wedding Guest from the "Rime of Ancient Mariner": he's neither relieved of guilt by sharing his story, nor sadder but wiser from hearing it. He's Wiser and Butcher, and Morally Finger Pointing to boot. His last line, after describing how he's taken back control from the Big Boss (by shooting him through the head in the same way as his father was killed) and looks at the camera, asking us what we've done lately. It's hard to think that the film would put me sitting with a distressed client, or Heather interviewing to work with under-privileged urban youth, in the same category as murdering a bad guy. But then, after he shoots the bad guy and has to go take a crap, whose going to fix his toilet if it's broken?
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