Theatrical Film Garners Praise, Retaliatory Physics Demonstrations
A brief expose on the finer points of the film WANTED
Michael Seaholm
Undergraduate/Computer Science
Between struggling with a dial-up connection at my rurally-located house and trying to work at Hardee's while simultaneously refraining from becoming a hollow shell of a human being, I had some free time this summer. Like many of you, I had the pleasure of enjoying the quintessentially American pastime of motion picture viewing. There were some gems amidst the usual summer malaise: The Hangover, Harry Potter and the Adjective Noun, and Inglourious Basterds, the last of these being notable not only because of its sweartastic title, but also because it features Brad Pitt with a mustache, an image that will remain in my fantasies forever. For the most part, it is fairly easy for people to look at the previews for a summer film and determine if it is well-written or if the script was thrown up or otherwise excreted into print form. However, there are some films that look relatively good on the surface, but end up making your head explode in disbelief. Case in point: WANTED, a ludicrous shoot-em-up starring Angelina “Bust Ya Up” Jolie and James “I Hope My Readers Got That Double Entendre” McAvoy. While most films clutch desperately to such archaic concepts as “plot” and “logical consistency,” WANTED boldly leaps into the face of convention to deliver to audiences a thrilling, if confusing, tale of people running around with guns.
Perhaps the entire concept of WANTED can be summed up in the first five minutes of the film. A middle-aged businessman is discussing matters with his nubile young secretary, but before the scene can turn into a poorly-scripted erotic foray, BLAM! A gunshot from the building across the street rings out, striking her dead. The businessman runs over to the elevator at the far end of the building, gets into position, and then pushes off at a dead sprint toward the window, denting the side of the elevator as he does so. This guy is moving so fast, he is creating mini-tornadoes of paper and office supplies in his wake. In slow-mo-but-its-really-fast-mo, he jumps straight through a window in a crouching position, whips out a pistol, and proceeds to kill the highly-trained enemy snipers several hundred feet away, even going so far as to dispatch one hiding behind a chimney by curving the bullet. This highly improbable assault is fruitless, however; it turns out to be a trap, and the businessman is shot. The camera follows the path of the bullet that kills him as it moves in reverse, panning out roughly 87.3 miles to his assassin, a scrubby-looking guy with an absurdly long ancient rifle who may as well have been wearing a big sign that says BAD GUY in striking red paint.
From here, we delve into the film proper, starting with the average day of protagonist Wesley, an office worker who lives in a dilapidated apartment with his controlling and belligerent girlfriend, who is blatantly cheating on him with his best friend, with whom he works under a verbally abusive and critical boss. He also has a stress condition that causes his heart to palpitate crazily and which happens to create the same time-stopping bullshit that the mystery man from the beginning of the film seems to have mastered. Oblivious to these awesome powers, Wesley takes stress pills as needed to control his condition. His life, which is so deep in the shitter that it has practically reached the septic tank, is suddenly and necessarily changed when fellow heart-problem sufferer Angelina Jolie intervenes to save Wesley at the supermarket from the scrubby assassin from the beginning of the film. From there, the duo proceed to a textile mill, where Wesley meets the illustrious Morgan Freeman, among others. Mr. Freeman explains in his usual dulcet tones that he is the leader of a millenia-old group of weavers-turned-assassins, smiling apologetically for the rather predictable plot twist as he does so. He also explains that Wesley's condition is a rare genetic gift that causes one's pulse to exceed 400 heartbeats per minute. Instead of causing cardiac arrest, which is usually a symptom of death, this defect makes Wesley an elite assassin. As proof, Wesley is ordered at gunpoint to shoot the wings off a group of flies congregating above a nearby garbage can. With a spastic flailing of the arms that would make Kermit the Frog proud, he fires randomly into the swarm, shooting off only the wings as he was instructed. The whole ordeal plays out like a warped adolescent fantasy, the kind where Regular Joe Blow turns out to be Captain Awesome, MD.
From there, Wesley is admitted into the assassin's guild and begins his obligatory training montage. I blacked out at this point due to the sheer insanity that followed, but here's what I pieced together. Apparently, the guild employs a guy named the Repair Man, who essentially beats members with his fists, presumably so that their skin forms a tough callous that can withstand assault, much like Mickey Rourke. There's also a knife specialist, a shooting instructor, and some Russian guy who straps explosive wristwatches to mice. That last item was not one of my patented non sequiturs; the Russian mouse-exploder was an actual plot-relevant character in the film. Any semblance of logic up to this point is thrown out the window when the newly-inducted Wesley meets Morgan Freeman near a centuries-old mechanical loom for briefing. Mr. Freeman pleasantly explains that the loom prints out their assassination targets through code: in a given space of cloth, a fiber under the weave is a zero and a fiber above the weave is a one. And as if the idea of a binary loom isn't bad enough, he continues to explain that the loom is doing this by itself. So, the brains behind this whole operation is a sentient weaving loom, whose instructions are printed out in binary on sheaves of cloth...
I blacked out again. Perhaps it was because the film was so awesome that my heart forgot to circulate blood through my brain. At any rate, when I came to, I saw that Wesley had become a turncoat and was fighting against the assassins. It turns out they had become corrupt and could only be stopped by a lone soldier. Lucky for Wesley, he was just one man. At the climax of the film, Wesley uses hundreds of explosive-laden mice to destroy part of the compound so that he could get in and wreak havoc. It was intense. Everybody inside the building was a trained assassin, and everyone was shooting. There were guns, the throwing of guns, and when the guns ran out of ammo, they just grabbed more guns and kept going. Wesley was matrixing his way across the warehouse floor with such skill that I had to make up a word just to describe it. Despite his best efforts, however, he is captured by Morgan Freeman and his inner circle of ultra-assassins. Wesley reveals that Morgan Freeman was falsifying the kill orders for his own personal gain, after which Mr. Freeman counter-reveals that each one of the assassin's names, including his own, had come up from the loomputer as targets to kill. He leaves the room in triumph, sure that the assassins will forget about the orders and just assassinate the hell out of Wesley, but Angelina Jolie, in a literally impossible move, curves a bullet in a perfect circle, killing all of the assassins and, by extension, herself. Wesley then goes on to search for Morgan Freeman, who has left the building.
I won't spoil the ending for you, not because it is a good conclusion but because it should be fairly predictable. Looking back upon this film, I am struck by the sheer balls it must have taken for the director and staff to continue filming and not end up shrieking, “What... what have I DONE?!” and running out of the room during production. The end result of their unflinching work: a film that just plain baffles the hell out of me, and hopefully some of you, too. I would find out more about the creative process that the screenplay writer or writers for WANTED went through, but I would rather offer this imaginary dialogue:
Screenwriter 1: So, Wesley just quit his boring desk job. What should we have him do?
Screenwriter 2: How about this: He hits his best friend with a keyboard...
Screenwriter 1: And some keys fall out to spell “FUCK YOU” on the screen!
Screenwriter 2: And the second “U” should be-
Screenwriter 1 & 2: (in unison) His best friend's tooth!
Screenwriter 1 & 2: (again in unison) BRILLIANT!!!
(They throw bundles of money at each other in celebration)