Wanted Looks Good (part deux)

Ebert gives it a decent rating of 3 stars, so I'll definitely be seeing it. I actually wasn't crazy about the original Mark Millar comic, but only because it was so extreme and honest in its violence. Imagine a world with super heroes and super villains, but the super villains end up winning and killing all the heroes, then fast forward 20 years. That's Wanted, the original Millar book. Well, what I never realized until I read that book was that villains, even super villains, are horrible, abominations, and without the heroes to stop them, they would the ability to satisfy any of their desires. And guess what, they're super villains, and so by definition their preference suck. It's full of rape, murders, random acts of violence, you name it. And as it is now available in graphic novel, when you read it all at once, it was kind of a lot to take. It sounds like they kept some of the basic violent elements, and the dark villain, anti-hero, stuff, in this adaptation, but lost the super villain stuff and replaced it with just an assassin's guild. Nevertheless, Ebert's review is funny. He realizes what the movie and isn't, and gets the genre, but still takes the movie to task in the end.

“Wanted,” directed by a hot Russian actionmeister named Timur Bekmambetov, is a film entire lacking in two organs I always appreciate in a movie: a heart and a mind. It is mindless, heartless, preposterous. By the end of the film, we can’t even believe the values the plot seems to believe, since the plot is deceived right along with us. The way to enjoy this film is to put your logic on hold, along with any higher sensitivities that might be vulnerable and immerse yourself as if in a video game. That “Wanted” will someday be a video game, I have not the slightest doubt. It may already be a video game, but I’m damned if I’ll look it up and find out. Objectively, I award it all honors for technical excellence. Subjectively, I’d rather be watching Danny Kaye in the film version of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”