The Dower Power Hour

I went to see the trashy action flick, Wanted and I couldn’t resist posting a quick review of the film here. Wanted succeeded in entertaining me with its flashy action sequences but failed in every other measure of a movie.

The protagonist was probably one of the most unsympathetic, dislikable characters that has ever been set up to be a hero. At the beginning of the film, he’s whiny, indecisive, and spineless. In the beginning of the film he’s angry, self-righteous, and bitter. By the end of the film he’s just self-righteous (X3). At the beginning he tells the audience that he “used to be a loser like you.” Look bud, I came here to watch a movie, not get insulted! The abuse doesn’t stop there. The final line of the movie is delivered by our hero speaking directly to his audience, “This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?”

Apparently the only two lifestyle choices are working a normal job as a spineless nobody and being an assassin with a bad attitude.

The script was terrible. Just awful. Even fine actors like Morgan Freeman were unable to deliver some of these lines. I was literally squirming in my seat throughout the film after being subjected to some of the must unnatural dialog ever uttered in a theater (yes I am including the audience in that measure.) The language alternated from being extremely lofty, “we are an elite fraternity of assassins operating for 1,000 years to maintain order in a chaotic world” to a lot of childish cursing, often within the same sentence.

The plot is predictable (I totally called the “surprise” twist) and to call it implausible is a massive understatement. I have three words for you “Loom of Fate.” All the likable characters died and the the unlikeable characters weren’t unpleasant enough for the audience to be happy when bad things happened to them, just bad enough to wish they had less screen time.

Oh, and I would like to confirm the underlying misogyny of the film. Every single female character was portrayed very negatively with the exception Angelina Jolie’s character, and she was basically portrayed as a sex symbol.

Which brings me to my final point - this movie was in almost every way a male adolescent fantasy. Youth finds out he has super violence powers. Beats up all the mean people who made his life miserable before. Gets trained by hot sex symbol babe who is older and inexplicably attracted to him. In the end he has “taken control of his life” through a lot of violence and swearing. If I were thirteen, I would probably think this movie was the coolest thing since I discovered HBO shows softcorn pornography at night. However since I am not thirteen, I am forced to call it what it is: an awful film that should not be viewed by anyone outside its target audience.

*Edit.* I wanted to add that this movie is based on a comic book which, from the synopsis I read on Wikipedia, looks like it has a much darker and less juvenile premise than the film that carries its name. Too bad.