Marvel mines its junk bins for Thor-ible film

Talk about starting the summer movie season with a bang — a bang to the side of the head. Some movies give you a good time; Thor just assaults you then gloats over your unconscious body.

Oh, it gets worse: it’s all in 3-D because two dimensions of torture just aren’t enough. Call me a contrarian stooge for not liking this beloved comic movie. Call me an elitist snob for not appreciating the dense comic mythology. Call me a jerk for blasting a movie you’ve been dying to see. Just don’t call me when Thor gives you a raging headache from its paralyzing 3-D effects.

Here is Thor, a blond bruiser with a bad attitude. The film begins on Earth but jumps to another planet, Asgard — mind the pronunciation — where Thor and his buddies, all of them wrapped in similar football padding, prance around beating up bad guys on ice planet Jotunheim. Asgard, Jotunheim, Mjolnir, Volstagg … the names will only make sense if you’re a Nordic raider, or have somehow braved ridicule by reading Thor comics when everyone else was reading X-Men and Superman. (Seriously, Thor?!? Is Marvel out of comics to adapt? What’s next Dolphin Boy?)

Thor is steeped in mythology. He ain’t no simple Spider-Man, who can be summed up in three sentences: “Spider bites boy. Boy gets super powers. Boy uses super powers to fight crime.” Thor’s origin story, which pains the entire first half of the movie, is more complicated. He’s the son of Odin, a wise and great god-king in Asgard, a land that has a railway of lightning that can traverse the cosmos, though Thor rides to the lightning machine on a horse. Odin must choose the next god-king, which comes down to Thor and his weasely little brother Loki. I knew Loki was the villain in the first shot because he had slicked-back hair — it’s almost always a dead giveaway, more so than the “No. 1 Villain” T-shirt.

A power struggle erupts and Thor is cast to earth without his powers, of which there are many: flight, lightning punches, sonic booms kicks, and the wielding of a boomerang hammer. In an earlier scene, Odin tells Thor that his hammer is a “weapon to destroy, or a tool to build.” Guess what Thor uses it for? I kept wishing that IQ-deficient Thor spoke like Hulk: “Me Thor. Me crush with hammer.” No one expects Thor to fly down to the South and start repairing tornado damage, or zip on across to Japan to rebuild from the tsunami, but that line is insulting. Marvel would rather inject Drano into its eyeballs than feature a superhero who builds something. Name me one fat comic fan that would sit through a movie about Superman repairing levees or Batman doing homeless outreach to crackheads.

Much of the film takes place on Asgard, the realm of Thor, and these scenes are horrible in nearly every way. The dialogue is laughable, the effects are weak, and all the mythology is just silly. And there are more funny hats than the royal wedding. The Earth scenes are slightly better, including the one where Thor walks into a diner and says, “This mortal form has grown weak. I require sustenance.” He orders more coffee by throwing his mug on the floor and yelling, “Another!” You’ll laugh, as I did, but only because Thor’s the dimmest of Marvel’s bulbs. Oddly enough, Thor’s staging of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would be quite moving.

Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, a relative newcomer. He’s a perfect Thor if only because he plays right into the title character’s oafish goofiness, which only contradicts the film’s later heroic posing. Hemsworth is surrounded by some major talent, including two Oscar winners — Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins — though the characters can’t seem to get a foothold on the material. They spend too much time blubbering in convoluted prose and endlessly explaining Odin’s many faults to ever recover from the film’s melodramatic undertones. When the action elements finally wrestle the plot away from the Asgardian windbags, it’s too late and Thor is mired in too much story, too many cruddy 3-D effects and all those silly outfits.

Thor’s director, Kenneth Branagh, a fine Shakespearean actor and director, was working with too many elements here. The dialogue is atrocious. The pacing is unbalanced. There are too many characters. And generally he makes some critical missteps. For instance, actor Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) is cast in a role that requires him to wear a ridiculous costume, walk in a clunky robotic gait and speak in a chunky monotone. Why bury a fine actor in a meaningless role? The movies seems bored with its characters, which is probably why it later resorts to outright kidnapping when Thor faces off against, I kid you not, the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That doggone extra dimension of movie doesn’t help any of this. Much of the film is shot in that hyper-cut style of editing. I find that fad difficult to watch in 2-D, but here it is in 3-D painstakingly slamming itself against your frontal lobe trying to batter out a seizure or two. With action pieced together from dozens of angles and then sped up in a flurry of images, the 3-D effect is useless and counterproductive. By the time your eyes convince your brain that what you’re seeing is a three-dimensional image the shot changes and the whole process starts over again — we’re talking nanoseconds here, but they add up. And since elements within each shot are constantly shifting from foreground to background, and back again, the film constantly plays tricks with your eyes. As if to make matters worse, every camera angle, even ones as simple as basic close-ups on talking heads, are tilted, as if Branagh left his Shakespeare collection under one leg of the camera tripod. At best the 3-D won’t work; at worst you’ll get a headache or feel dizzy.

In the end, though, the joke is on the audience: Thor will get people to pay money to sit indoors and wear sunglasses.

Watchmen: Overrated comic geekery

Last year The Dark Knight opened up the comic book universe for the masses. And now Watchmen slams the door shut and retreats to the basement to geek out.

Just as I was getting fond of the comic book movies — I had forgiven Spider-Man 3, adored Hellboy 2, and was in awe of Dark Knight — here’s one that proves why comics are an acquired taste and why they fluctuate in popularity so wildly within every generation.

Nevertheless, though, comics — especially graphic novels, a term which is overused — are still big. As a testament to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Time magazine named it one of 100 important novels — list buddies include The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. The graphic novel may be brilliant, but the film is a convoluted mess, a tired and ridiculous port of the source material. No wonder Alan Moore, who looks kinda like Karl Marx on Watchmen's back cover, had his name removed from the film credits.

Before going any further let's settle some business: I’m reviewing the film, not the graphic novel, which I will leave untouched for its many fans, those who’ve seen the sun the last decade and those who haven’t — or, more bluntly, those who’ve had sex with a real person and those who haven’t. For people who haven’t read the book, like myself, don’t let anyone tell you that reading it is mandatory. The film negates the need to read the book, because, let’s face it, if we wanted to read we’d go to the library, not the movie theater. Besides, a film is obligated to work on its own terms within the medium. If it requires further reading to appreciate or “get,” then it’s not a film, but an appendix to the book and that’s just hooey. That goes for all films, not just Watchmen.

The movie exists in a strange alternate universe: not only did Richard Nixon not resign but he was elected to a third term; masked superheroes emerge as social avengers and occasionally as troublemakers; the Soviets are ready to launch nukes at the United States (I guess that part is familiar); and blimps circle the skies for no apparent reason. It’s 1985, but it feels like the 2019 of Blade Runner.

Watchmen begins like most noir stories: in the rain with a grim voiceover narration. The voice is Rorschach, a gravel-throat superhero detective. His face is covered with a mask stained with mutating, but symmetrical, inkblots — I kept trying to notice a pattern or maybe recurring shapes to no avail. Rorschach is tracking down leads on a murdered superhero, a retired weapons expert and deadbeat named Comedian, who was thrown out a window from a height I wouldn’t recommend jumping from. His investigation leads him to other superheroes: hip brunette Silk Spectre, a Clark Kentish dweeb who used to be Nite Owl, the billionaire conglomerate Ozymandias, and Dr. Manhattan, a glowing-blue transcendentalist who might actually be God, or maybe just his proxy.

These characters — with exception to Dr. Manhattan; more on him later — are not super as we might think of superheroes. They have no special abilities, no mutated DNA, no comet crystals or krypton allergies. They’re more or less like Batman: inventive gadget designers, lethal in a brawl and all-around street smart. The fact that the masked crimefighters co-exist with normal everyday folks is apparently what made the graphic novel so compelling. I wasn’t so compelled with the idea here, mainly because the superhero ideals don’t really exist. They talk about truth, justice and the American way, but they don’t actually go out and live under that credo. Their whole routine feels like a fetish game of dress-up, one that they hardly take serious. When Silk Spectre and Nite Owl do return to their superhero moonlighting, all they can muster is a post-coitus jailbreak for the ever-deranged and now maskless Rorschach, who tells the inmates, “I’m not locked in here with you; you’re locked in here with me.” The scene is fun, but it accentuates that there’s no dynamic between who these people are and what they represent.

I’ve yet to mention a story arc, which is intentional since it’s so often abandoned for all the comic minutiae. The plot, though, involves the murder of Comedian and the devious implications behind it. Rorschach, the only one who senses a nefarious scheme, pushes forward even as the film skids into everyone’s origin stories, which might be effective tangents in a film with more focus or maybe a shorter running time (165 minutes). Instead the film spins out of control with each new series of flashbacks, some of which reveal how Vietnam was won (Dr. Manhattan microwaved the North Vietnamese Army into gibs) and others that provide us with the emotional anchor points of the characters’ lives (Rorschach killing a child abductor). All this is going on while the end game, which might be nuclear war with the Russkies, draws closer with no clear path through the nonsense.

This leads us into Watchmen’s most glaring error: Dr. Manhattan, probably one of the most poorly written superheroes ever written onto a screen. (I’ve since read Roger Ebert’s review, and was confounded as to why he didn’t scrutinize this blue guy more.) Here’s a character that draws comparisons to deity, yet is so consistently stupid that I think he was married to Nick Lachey for several years. He has the power to obliterate every nuclear weapon on the planet, yet he teleports himself and his ever-present wiener to Mars where he meditates on a glass spaceship because … well, because why the hell not. And when the doomsday clock is about to strike for mankind, he pukes poetry about the human condition and asks rhetorical philosophical questions that contradict everything that’s been established from the simplest metaphysical level right on up. This is a misguided character in a chronically misguided movie.

And seriously, enough of his glowing balls. It reminds me of that Film Snob entry on “film vs. movie”: A movie is where you see a woman’s bare breasts. A film is where you see Harvey Keitel’s penis. It doesn’t say anything about glowing genitalia; maybe in the next edition.

Penises aside, Watchmen is thematically confused, if not altogether morally bankrupt. Dr. Manhattan, and those he colludes with, actually make a case for killing millions to save billions. Only in a story this convoluted and preposterous would the characters be denied other choices. The fact that this movie even offers the choice proves that it’s edgy and daring, but to what cost? It sacrifices humanity for the characters’ egos, and that’s unforgivable in a superhero film.

This last development, set in an Arctic lair of all places, reminded me of two films: First, Sophie’s Choice, where a woman is told to pick one of her two children to die in the Holocaust. And another, Fail-Safe, where Americans willingly nuke New York City to pacify the Soviets and stop an impending World War III. Both films offer their characters horrific choices, but we can sympathize with their dilemmas because they’re not omnipotent beings who act on their quantum subconscious (i.e. Manhattan), but real people with real hopes and fears. We sympathize because we respect the path that led to their choices. The audience is not given that much freedom in Watchmen, a movie that mandates our sympathy, yet never earns it.

The others superheroes aren’t so bad, though: Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) plays a retired doofus well enough, complete with giant glasses and ill-fitting suits; Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman, whose pluckiness I admired in The Hearbreak Kid) is both leggy and curvy in just the right proportions; and Rorschach seems to have a warrior’s code and maybe even morals under that smearing mask of his. Rorschach is played by Bad News Bear Jackie Early Haley, who’s so terrific that I was left craving for his own movie away from everyone else.

I’ll just admit it: I hated this story. I hated the way it manipulated the characters into choices. And I hated the way it held itself in such high regard, as if it just assumed it were the coolest kid on the block without having to prove itself. Especially infuriating is the way it mythologized Watchmen’s flat, vacuous plot; give me Dark Knight’s three-dimensional mythology any day of the week. Director Zack Snyder (300), who honored the graphic novel by turning nearly every comic panel into a frame within his movie, is a skilled storyteller; it’s just unfortunate this story is so unfulfilling.

I also admit that I loved the rock ’n’ roll soundtrack — with Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel — and the high-octane action editing over it. Also spectacular are the visual effects: Nite Owl’s impressive bird jet, the electric field generator that creates god-like superheroes, Rorschach’s mask, and Dr. Manhattan’s array of explosion and teleportation tricks. Many of the effects are one-offs, little blink-and-you’ll-miss moments sprinkled throughout. One of them shows Manhattan’s circulatory system suspended in the air. Another has him analyzing an exploded view of a tank, as if every piece were pulled apart simultaneously. Visually, Watchmen is incredible. But just visually.

Does any of this Watchmen bashing matter, though? Probably not, simply because the hype has already been built and reversing it is something even Dr. Manhattan couldn’t accomplish (assuming he’s not on Venus when we’re looking for him). Comic books fans will love Watchmen, not because it’s worth loving, but because they’ve been programmed to love it, as if questioning its authenticity were a high crime against their beloved comics. Non-comic fans will enjoy the pop-art imagery, but they'll agree with this: Watchmen is overrated.

This review originally ran in the West Valley View March 6, 2009.

Dark Knight proves itself after Ledger's death

The Dark Knight passed into film lore the moment Heath Ledger died. We started a posthumous worship of the actor almost immediately, which is a crass and offensive thing Americans do with dearly departed stars nowadays. Dead or not, though, his performance is legendary, the role we’ll measure all other villains by for decades to come — Darth Vader, Bill the Butcher, The Joker.

But don’t judge the movie on Ledger alone; he’s one cog in a very large and very well-lubricated machine that is The Dark Knight, one of this year’s most densely complex films, as much an epic tragedy as it is a comic-book thrill ride. It's also permeated with a sadness that was unexpected, yet imperative to the scope of the story. All of it, though, is masterful filmmaking, the stuff we’ve come to expect from Christopher Nolan.

We begin with Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Gotham’s new district attorney, a bright ray of hope cresting over the city’s madness. In one day alone Dent, square jaw and all, arrests the mob — all of them. So many that the courtroom arraignment is standing-room only, filled with 500 buttonmen, Mafia lieutenants and all the dons in their expensive suits. While Dent mops up in court, Batman stalks the night and cleans up what the police and district attorney can’t touch. Dent and Batman: the White Knight and the Dark Knight.

Batman and billionaire Bruce Wayne are still played by Christian Bale, whose talents seem limitless. Bale seems more athletic here, which may be in part to a new Batman suit that looks like a super-soldier outfit with a cape and ears. Apparently the suit is more flexible, which allows faster hand-to-hand combat, building extractions, cape soaring and gadget deployment. Bruce is more skeptical of authority inside this Batman, but he sees Dent, who is destined to become the bitter Two-Face, as the logical and legal replacement to his caped crusader. At one point he has Alfred, his wise butler (played with subtle perfection by Michael Caine), draw up retirement papers.

With the pressure on the mob, and Dent beaming from City Hall, the city seems to be heading toward better times, and director Nolan shows us as much with daylight scenes and afternoon camera passes of Gotham’s landmarks; for a while the darkness seems to subside.

Enter the Joker, a nutjob with endless resources and invention. With a maniacal sneer and high-pitched giggle, he’s introduced with a magic trick so audacious it’s as mad as he is. Later when he’s arrested, the cops pull dozens of knives from his pockets while he mocks them with fake applause. In a single day, the Joker has stolen all the mobs’ money, so much that the bills stack up into a fort bigger than most single-family homes. The Joker’s proposition to the mob: Let him eliminate Batman and Dent with their blessing and half their money.

Of course, it all gets much more complex, too much to catalog here, but rest assured that every character — including Bruce Wayne’s ex, Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal); Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman); and engineer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) — figures into it. I wouldn’t call the film a mystery, but it uses all these characters to reveal itself to us in intelligent ways and never all at once. Bruce Wayne’s submersion into the darker edges of Batman’s soul are intricate developments that expand as the Joker takes hold. The film never handles it in broad, obvious scenes. They unfold around us, involving us in the processes of Batman’s sacrifices, of Dent’s fateful redemption, of Joker’s elaborate abduction of the hero’s principles. And not everything is solved with a fistfight; some of it is a moral and philosophical battle, like when Joker rigs two boats to explode but gives the passengers the detonators.

Above presenting an action story, a thriller, a suspense and romance (Bruce is still in love with Rachel), Dark Knight also ponders that good-versus-evil dilemma like no other movie has ever attempted. The mythology of the superhero is turned into a bona fide ethos, an authentic philosophy with real values and moral boundaries. It suggests that maybe Batman is not the hero the city needs or wants, and give him a long enough story arc and he’ll be as bad as the Joker. It also plays with the theme of duality, which is personified completely in Two-Face’s grotesque transformation. It’s complicated material and it’s no walk in the park to be sure. It provides an interesting dynamic with the film’s action, which is intense.

There are numerous chases, brawls and show-stopping gunfights, all of them with surprise conclusions and some interesting ethical dilemmas: Can Batman save two people at once? Will a normal person kill to save his own life? Will a good man go bad for the wrong reasons? For once, here’s a movie where the action punctuates the movie’s themes. The action also introduces us to the new Batman vehicle, the Batpod, which is an ejected piece of the Batmobile. It’s essentially a motorcycle with fat racing tires that Batman cruises around town on, cape flapping in the wind, trying to stop each new Joker disaster. Which leads us to …

The Joker. He’s presented as a lovable loon, but also deadly. In one scene he breaks a pool cue in half and tells three men to fight to the death to fill a slot on his team; in another he phones a detonator surgically implanted in a man’s stomach. Ledger avoided Jack Nicholson’s Joker and went with a more isolated, more psychologically deranged character. His origins are never shown — though he tells his victims a variety of stories about his facial scars — yet he’s given an almost poetic edge that seems to come from deep-seated torment. Watch how he hangs his head outside the window of a car as it swerves through Gotham, listen to his whimsical dialogue filled with nuance and rage, witness his destruction of a hospital while dressed in drag … it’s all kind of silly and goofy, but chilling to a level that’s almost uncomfortable.

And because Nolan has developed his characters so expertly, by the time Batman and Joker meet in an interrogation room it's as if two giants were clashing on the screen, like when Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, after all they'd been through in their careers, finally met for coffee in Heat. Batman seethes and growls from behind his suit, Joker smirks and rubs his fingers through his limp, lifeless hair. It's Clash of the Titans, in comic form.

Will Ledger live up to your expectations? That depends, mainly because fans are putting too much pressure on the deceased actor. He’s practically already won an Academy Award from the movie previews alone. I think he’ll be universally cheered, and only partly because he’s passed on, mostly, though, because he is truly terrifying as Batman’s famous nemesis.

Really, though, you can’t begin to understand The Dark Knight by looking at the Joker alone. It’s Joker, it’s Batman, it’s Bruce Wayne and it’s Harvey Dent, who’s Two-Face looks like one of those medical cross sections from encyclopedias. It’s also a pivotal performance by Tiny Lister, who plays a prisoner who makes a decision that shows the renewed strength of Gotham, even as Batman and Dent descend into their fates. The sum of these characters has allowed The Dark Knight to transcend from comic-book movie to dramatic art. Important, character-rich art born from the pulp of DC Comics.

This is a powerful film, one of the best this year. Nolan (The Prestige, Memento) has taken what he did in Batman Begins and filleted it wide open to reveal the darker abysses of Batman’s soul. It’s a natural progression, and it only makes me want to cheer louder for the third and final picture.

***This review originally ran in the West Valley View July 18, 2008.***

Hancock becomes what it hates

Hancock positions itself as an anti-comic movie for those of us sick of superpowers and unitards. But by the end it becomes — what else? — a rather bland comic-book movie, the very kind of film it was harpooning 60 minutes before. And a unitard makes a brief, crotch-hugging cameo.

It’s a shame, too: Hancock was really onto something. We’ve never really seen a homeless superhero. Or a drunk superhero doing twelve-step programs in the state lockup. Or have we ever seen Superman do a colon checkup using another man's head? Marvel and DC have touched on some anti-hero themes in their comics, but they’ve yet to trickle down into the films — and never at this potency. Sure, we saw Spider-Man in his Viagra phase (Spider-Man 3) and Superman no doubt battled some demons, including an evil version of himself (Superman III), but Hancock takes it all to a new level. And then he blows it.

For once, though, I can’t blame Will Smith. In the past his overacted cockiness has killed movies, but not here. He’s right at home inside the deviantly dysfunctional Hancock, a superhero who has no qualms with getting superbuzzed and passing out under bus shelters. This is how we first meet him — a wreck of a man with stink oozing from every pore. One question, though: how much bourbon does it take to get a superhero drunk? You’d think a tanker truck would be about right, but the movie suggests a single bottle is quite enough.

Hancock lives in Los Angeles and the entire city seems to be aware of his superpowers — how refreshing of a comic-book movie to skip the hero’s origins. Los Angelinos are also aware of his frequent blunders, in fact he even has his own channel on YouTube. In one clip, he’s seen tossing a beached whale back into the ocean … on top of a sailboat. That's nothing, though, compared to a recent bank heist he foils. The folly carves up a freeway overpass, totals several cop cars and ends when he impales an SUV full of bank robbers onto the Capitol Records Tower requiring untold millions to remove. The city is his playground and with no one strong enough to enforce the law on him or present him a repair bill he’s allowed to destroy at will. But the city grumbles louder and louder.

It all boils over when Hancock causes a train derailment to save one man’s cruddy Volvo. The people turn on him, but the Volvo’s driver, PR hack Ray (Jason Bateman), sees an opportunity to turn the superhero’s image around. Hancock reluctantly accepts the offer after meeting Ray’s beautiful wife Mary (Charlize Theron), who is hiding something that might come as a surprise, a surprise you will be sad to learn is not interesting in any way. I could almost see director Peter Berg, that guy who's always swearing loudly on his movie's DVD featurettes, smirking from behind his camera, like he was pulling a fast one on us with Theron as the bait. Better luck next time, Peter.



Before the surprise is where Hancock starts to get interesting: milquetoast Ray vows to fix his new client’s troubled image. For starters, no more hard landings or take-offs during his aerial maneuvers around LA; the city is tired of fixing craters in the streets, Ray tells him. Next up, Hancock has to go to prison for the big-ticket items he’s destroyed. This leads to some enjoyable prison scenes including one where he puts an inmate’s head where the sun doesn’t shine or was never intended to shine (hint: it rhymes with "crass mole"). At any point Hancock — named after his signature, John Hancock — can easily just fly over the razor wire or crush through the concrete of his cell. But he sticks it out, even when the recess basketball is shot outside the prison yard.



The entire movie is kind of fun and goofy, but the story takes some weird twists that deviate from the original theme, which is Hancock’s moral rehabilitation. The movie seems to get bored with him and ditches to a new story when the boredom sets it. Sure enough, another superhero shows up and we’re thrust into another story — something about how two immortals can’t be near each other because their powers cancel each other out. Hancock worked best when it was about Hancock, and the second character not only allows a deviation from that, but a complete abandonment of the meat of the story.



It turns into a mediocre fireworks show with Hancock and his new equal stomping around the city causing all kinds of havoc. We got enough of that during Incredible Hulk, yet here we are again with lots more crumbled concrete and pulverized high-rises. Will Smith remains upbeat and enjoyable — at one point he impales a man on a Zagnut bar — but the whole routine feels like déjà vu from any of the last five superhero-filled summers.

And because Charlize Theron photographs so beautifully ...

Full of Holes … and that's a good thing

Wanted is far too hip for its own good. The only reason the shooter gets away with material this preposterous is because it hardly puts any effort into its hipness.

Shoot’em Up, the last movie that tried to make gun violence sexy and cool, put in too much effort; we rejected it because it felt forced. It was the kid who tried to please everyone and thus pleases no one.

Wanted consists of a great deal of style, but with an underlying hint of substance. This isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it invokes deeper thought in a curious final move by a character played by Angelina Jolie, but more on that later.

The film picks up with Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) as he narrates his own story from within an office cubicle at an accounting firm. “It’s my anorexic boss’ birthday,” he says in the first line of the movie. We see the boss and she’s not anorexic — she’s tipping the scales and plowing cake down her gullet. The film is filtered through Wesley’s glib attitude like muddy water through cheese cloth, his words hateful of himself and of his pathetic existence. The boss comes over and waves a stapler in the air, maniacally stapling pages to punctuate her executive threats. It sends Wesley into an anxiety attack. This is his life — wretched and meaningless.

What he needs is a revelation, a liberation. It comes at the pharmacy, where he’s marked for extermination by the world’s greatest assassin, a man named Cross. We’ve seen Cross earlier in the film as he made an impossibly accurate sniper shot that travels — over the course of about five miles — through train cars, office windows and into the back of a man’s head sending brain matter and skull into our laps. The bullet that makes this world-record trajectory is machine-cut with spirals, and breaks apart in stages like an Apollo rocket. So Cross is good at what he does, and the only reason Wesley is alive is thanks to Fox (Angelina Jolie), a competing assassin who whisks him away in a blizzard of copper-jacketed lead.

Jolie, whose sexiness the movie feeds from, doesn’t kill many people, but I’ve always wondered how she justifies roles like this one to the United Nations, where she frequently works to promote humanitarian needs. “She’s an ethical assassin,” she might say. She’d be right: Fox does not kill indiscriminately. She’s part of a group called The Fraternity, a 1,000-year-old organization of weavers who analyze cotton fibers for ways to right the universe. This part gets a little sketchy so hold on: life requires balance and a woven piece of cloth can secretly reveal the names of bad people, those who have or will disrupt the cosmos with their actions. The Fraternity’s job is to then eliminate these irregularities from the fabric of the universe. It's like Charlie's Angels if Charlie was a pillowcase.


The fact that it does this with a certain of amount of PCP-induced zeal is one reason that Wanted works so well. It’s action on overdrive, with no regards to basic physics or Isaac Newton. Things explode recklessly, are shot randomly, and cars are required to do stunts almost too farfetched even for a movie this silly. In one scene a hitman can’t kill a man in a limo due to a layer of bullet-proof glass. The solution: flip a car over the limo so the assassin, mid-flip, can shoot the guy through the open sunroof. In another scene, Wesley is scooped up into the passenger seat of a car in just such a way that it took me four viewings to figure it out completely.

Wanted’s big claim to fame is the way it suggests that a bullet’s trajectory can be controlled to a certain extent. “Curve the bullet,” Fox tells Wesley, who’s never even shot a straight one before. With some practice — a flick of the wrist, a spin on the gun barrel, and mostly dumb luck — he’s curving bullets around corners, hanging chunks of beef and a very brave Fox, whose hair brushes aside as the bullet cuts its curved path around her. Nevermind the fact that they can't see behind corners, but whatever.

The bullet-curving business reminds me of what a golfer once told me: “You know what would happen if I could control my slice?” I didn’t know. “Nothing,” he joked. The golfer would be intrigued to see what curving bullets can do: eliminate bad guys hiding behind columns, shoot other bullets in mid-air and ventilate chests on curved pavilions. One scene begins with about a dozen bad guys spread out against the walls of a round room. It doesn’t require too much invention to imagine the outcome. After The Matrix, in which humans dodged bullets, Wanted is the next logical step in the bullet evolution of Hollywood. What’s next, GPS smart bullets? Bullets with MP3 players? Bullets that no longer require guns to be fired?

Wanted is not all exhausting gunplay, but most of it is. And even though Jolie’s in it — she makes a poetic final decision that shows her extreme commitment to the Fraternity — a lot of the story falls onto McAvoy (Atonement), who must go from nerdy accountant to bullet-curving assassin in about two weeks. He must also brave various metaphysical speeches from Sloan, the wise leader of the Fraternity, a role only Morgan Freeman can give distinction. But who funds the Fraternity? Does the Universe have a checking account to pay these badasses? And if the loom goes haywire, are random people marked for death in the fabric? And who decided that binary was the loom's language? If you think about any part of Wanted for too long your brain will rattle to a stop, but it still works as a high-octane, super-stylish summer movie.

When Rambo came out earlier this year, it was called gun porn. Wanted is the next best thing — bullet porn.

***This review originally ran in the July 1, 2008 issue of the West Valley View.***