Wanted DVD > Reviews > Angelina and the Loom of Fate

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Very weak
Characters / Performances	Satisfactory
Special Effects	Outstanding
How does it compare to similar films?	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Spectacular action scenes which defy all logic and laws of physics
Disadvantages:	Silly .   Very silly .   And I wasn't comfortable with the violence .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Despite this summer's flock of big budget action movies being, so far, mercifully low on sequels and fairly high on critical praise, there's only been one which I've had any interest in seeing. I should probably tell you now, I'm not a fan of blockbuster films. Typical excitement just doesn't excite me. Seeing an actor give a terrific performance thrills me more than a car chase; a great soundtrack gets my heart pumping more than an explosion. Maybe I'm not the best person to be reviewing Wanted. But as a fan of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's previous film, Night Watch, I was intrigued to see how he would fare with this, his first Hollywood film.

A plot summary for this kind of film is probably superfluous, but here we go. James McAvoy plays Wesley, a bored office worker, getting bossed around, knowing that his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend, but doing nothing about it. One day, he is confronted by a woman in a shop (Angelina Jolie) who tells him his father was the world's greatest assassin, and Wesley is whisked away to a textiles factory, home to an underground band of assassins called the Fraternity.

The woman in the shop turns out to be called Fox, one of the most lethal of the Fraternity. Their leader (Morgan Freeman) tells us that they were formed 1000 years ago by a clan of weavers to preserve the balance of good and evil in the world. Their targets are chosen for them by destiny; picked out of a device called the Loom of Fate.

At this point I have to stop, because I can't take it seriously any more. The Loom of Fate?! This has to be the most ridiculous story device since the "chalk of fate" from Bekmambetov's last film, Day Watch. Just how does fate gain control of a loom in the first place? What if it picked out the name 'John Smith'? The very idea of a clan of weavers sitting around, deciding to set up a group to preserve the balance of the world is absolutely absurd!

Fortunately, the film doesn't try to take itself seriously, so neither should you. If you switch off your brain, forget the laws of physics and take it as an action-comedy, Wanted has enough visual flair and wildly overblown ideas in its action scenes to entertain its intended audience. However, herein lies a major problem: for a marketing campaign aimed so squarely at teenage males everywhere, this 18-rated film isn't half violent.

I don't normally mind violence in movies, but this goes way beyond all taste and decency; this is just sadistic. If you're a fan of CSI murder re-enactments, you'll be in your element: bullets pierce through skulls, freeze in mid-air then go backwards in slow motion, the wound sealing as it goes, and come back out the other side. Like with the film 300, the painstaking effort that has clearly been put in to creating the perfect splatter of CGI blood with every bullet ripping through flesh is worrying.

I'm no Christian either, but the dubious morals of McAvoy's character sit extremely uncomfortably with this teenage boy's fantasy of a movie. "What have you done lately?", he asks the audience, after putting a bullet through a man's head. Should we all be turning to a life of murdering people based on the prophesying of a flippin' magical loom? Fight Club advocated a similar 'self-discovery-through-violence' ideology, but Wanted takes it to unwelcome pastures, its message seeming to be that you aren't a man until you've brutally taken revenge on whatever causes you grief; that killing is the ultimate stress reliever and coming-of-age test.

For each of its interesting ideas (a keyboard smashed on someone's face sending keys and teeth into the camera to spell a message; clearing a building with a thousand exploding rats) there is one stolen from another film. A mixture of Fight Club, The Matrix and 300, even the twist is extremely familiar to one of cinema's greatest surprises. Plus, many of the director's extravagant visual touches are repeated until they lose all excitement. A bullet swerving? That's pretty cool, but by the end it's rendered even more ridiculous than it is to begin with. Two bullets crashing in mid-air? Great, but do we really need it three times in one fight scene?

Still, you have to admire the director's flair, and that's probably the only reason this film has been generally well received by the critics. For adults, Wanted is silly popcorn entertainment, executed superbly by an up and coming master of action. I'm still not converted to the blockbuster mentality of wrapping a turd in so much shiny packaging that it seems like a good film, but Wanted is far from being a turd.

5/10