Movie Review: Wanted

You could gargle bitumen and bin-juice for half an hour, and it couldn't leave a nastier taste in your mouth than this macho action thriller about a secret fraternity of assassins. It is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, evidently brought over to Hollywood on the strength of his wildly successful Russian movies like Day Watch. The stars are Angelina Jolie, sporting her now familiar default smirk, and our own James McAvoy stepping up to his first A-list role. The spectacle of their strange gym-built bodies, variously starved and pumped, and the boring, risk-free digital "stunts", can't distract you from just how dreary and insidious the whole business is. It looks as if it has been written by a committee of 13-year-old boys for whom penetrative sex is still only a rumour, and the resulting movie plays like a party political broadcast on behalf of the misogynist party.

James McAvoy plays Wes, an ordinary nerdy guy who has an office job which totally sucks. He's pathetic, a loser, on medication for anxiety attacks, of all the spurious and ridiculous ailments. His best friend is a bullying jock who is boning Wes's whiney and nagging girlfriend on the sly, and incidentally adding insult to injury by mooching cash off Wes for the necessary contraceptive materials. But Wes's untermensch life is turned around when Angelina Jolie pops up out of nowhere in a drugstore, saves Wes from a mysterious, spectacular attempt on his life, and shoves the gibbering soon-to-be-ex-nerd into her flashy automobile for a crash-bang chase along the city freeway, exchanging fire with the gunman.

Wes is evidently hated by the forces of darkness because, quite without knowing it, he is a ninja of topping people; his own father, a master assassin whom he never knew, has just been killed by the shadowy opposition. It is his fate to be a master killer, and it is the job of Jolie - known simply as "Fox" -to force him to step up, to accept his destiny and enter the Fraternity, a secret society of bespoke killers dedicated to taking out important bad guys. The Fraternity hides out inside what looks like a castle modelled on Balmoral, disguised as a community of weavers.

Their super-sexy way of shooting people - apart, obviously, from the usual technique of doing it with outstretched arm, gun tilted 90 degrees, face insouciantly pointing away from the victim - is to use a special bullet with corkscrew grooving. This, and a slight whiplash with the shooting arm, will cause the bullet to curve round corners, a setpiece which perhaps shows the influence of David Beckham. Wes of course blossoms into an alpha-male, and even gets some liplock action with Angelina, which looks like he's snogging a singed sofa.

Weirdly, though, it is Wes's pre-heroic life which is given the most passion by Bekmambetov. None of the violence and the action have a fraction of the beady-eyed intensity with which the director invests the moment where Wes quits his job and tells his boss to shove it. Because his boss is a fat ugly woman. This horrible bitch is always snapping at him and she gets her comeuppance in a big way, her obesity being a clear sign that she's asking to be brought low and laughed at. Her existence is briefly reprised at the end of the film, when one of Wes's bullets whistles through the doughnut she's gobbling.

I have to say I don't think I've seen a film recently which expresses hatred of women quite so openly, and fervently, as this one. In a way, Wes's boss is the most vivid female character in the film, more powerfully and pointedly conceived than the others: more than Wes's horrible, duplicitous girlfriend, who gets to be humiliated by seeing Wes kissing Fox and more than Fox herself, who is basically an honorary male. This is a film where womankind is represented by irrelevant sleek babes and obese comic foils, an ugly whorehouse aesthetic which really does sock over its contempt for femaleness very, very powerfully indeed.

Perhaps it's absurd to worry in these terms about a silly, disposable movie like this. And yet I can't help thinking that if a film treated any ethnic group the way this treats women, it would find itself in pretty hot water. And it's sad to see Angelina Jolie, a performer with style - who moreover did the assassin role with considerably more wit and charm in Mr and Mrs Smith - trundled out for this piffle. It's also sad to see James McAvoy offer an IQ-discount in a similar way. In an ideal world, the title would have the word "Not" tacked on to the front.

reviewed by Peter Bradshaw, published at http://film.guardian.co.uk

Related Posts