WARNING: chockfull of spoilers
Some friends and I went to see an amazingly bad movie last night: WANTED with ANGELINA JOLIE. Poor Angelina. Didn't she go into the hospital right around its release? No wonder. I wanted to shoot myself when they had Morgan Freeman say "kill this mothafocka." (even though the nice black man wears a suit and talks pretty, he's just an evil gangsta underneath--ohmygod, was that an anti-Obama message?) Exploding rats? Paraffin wax spa soaks? A self-pitying navel-gazing hero transforms into a self-centered navel-gazing prick?
What really bugged me was the callousness. Innocent people die. A train full of passengers falls off a bridge. But the only thing that seems important is the dude's need to kill his target. The tone reminds me of my former roommate Freddy, a young cubicle-dweller who spent much of his spare time playing Street Fighter II. When 9/11 happened, he looked at the TV, laughed and said, "Cool." Same demographic.
It's all tongue-in-cheek fun when the hero lays down a trail of peanut butter to lure scads of sickly-looking rats into a garbage truck, then straps thousands of tiny bombs to their backs (a chore which would realistically take how long?), then looses them into the textile mill where his foes are staked out (bad special effect: no rats seem to wear bombs when they are first released). But it seems like the rats don't even do anything because the hero comes in next and starts shooting right and left. So my question is: why spend hours strapping tiny bombs onto rat backs when it doesn't do squat? Is it fun to watch rats get blown up? Didn't anyone see Ratatouille? Ahem. Anyone? Well, let me tell you, that was a movie. Rats are people too! They cook like nobody's ferking business. Oh, but maybe there was a deeper message, like about the "rat race" and how those who slog away in cubicles are all little hairy mini-suicide bomber terrorists. Hm. Or maybe somebody just hates rats.
The suspension of disbelief premise: dude is trying to kill his own dad because he thinks his dad killed his dad, but his dad actually killed the dude they told him was his dad. So then, when he kills his dad (hanging out of a falling train) his dad says, essentially, All this time, I was your dad and now you've killed me. And Wesley, the hero, is all Oops.
OK, but if you were his dad, couldn't you have sent him an e-mail? A message taped to a flaming arrow?
In the end, Wesley, all full of himself now that he's such a bad ass, says, I used to be ordinary, I used to be like you, or some such thing. What he should have said was, I used to be a halfway sympathetic character, now I just suck. And the final line: What have you done lately? Argh! Once again. Great message. If you work in a cubicle, your life is expendable, but if you pick up a gun and start killing people, you become a god.
Yes, I know it's all about the special effects and Angelina's hotness and dude's torso and stuff.
But sheesh.
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