OVP: Wanted (2008)

Film: Wanted (2008)
Stars: James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Thomas Kretschmann, Common, Terence Stamp, Chris Pratt
Director: Timu Bekmambetov
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Mixing, Sound Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Well, that streak just took a huge hit in the head.  After a weirdly long spell of good to wonderful movies, I got my first clunker in a while this morning when I was watching Wanted, a film that you vaguely remember seeing seven years ago, and are surprised to find out Chris Pratt was in (and is naked in for you Andy Dwyer enthusiasts, for the record).  It's a film that you remember being kind of cool, with lots of shifting and angled bullets, plus Angelina Jolie holding a gun, which is always exciting, right?  The answer is decidedly wrong, as this movie is a joke, frequently relying on boring twists, ridiculous plots, and an oddly bad lead performance from the usually reliable James McAvoy.  It also got two Oscar nominations, which is why it's on this blog, but we'll get into that soon enough.  First, though, let's tackle that pesky thing called the plot (a word, perhaps, the screenwriters should have looked up in the dictionary prior than sitting front of their keyboards).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), a cubicle drone who lives his life on autopilot, constantly being berated by his boss and watching as his best friend Barry (Pratt) consistently one-ups him and has sex with his girlfriend.  The characters on this end of Wesley's life are meant to be nothing more than tropes, and that's really what they are.  Pratt is always watchable, and elevates what could be an even bigger loser role (the way he seems impressed with Wesley later in the film for punching him is vintage Andy Dwyer), but being cute only gets you so far in a movie, and the female roles are out of a classic straight-dude manual on female cliches.  Wesley is brought into a fraternity of assassins who want him to track down the man who killed his father named Cross (Kretschmann), being mentored by the gorgeous Fox (Jolie...get it, because she's a fox...my god this movie is opaque) and being watched over by Sloan (Freeman) who serves as his boss and shows him the magical loom that spins out whom the assassins are going to kill.

This presents the first of many problems, because you see Morgan Freeman's Sloan is actually the bad guy.  This is obvious because Thomas Kretschmann has no scenes showing him to be the bad guy and never actually seems to want to kill James McAvoy.  Kretschmann is bordering on the "little too young" to be McAvoy's actual father, for the record, but that's where the film points him in the plot.  As a result of this, we sort of have to question the intelligence of every other assassin in the group for never questioning exactly what happens with the loom and whether vigilante justice is a good idea.  A thousand years is a long time for some common skepticism to not rear its thoughtful head, and it's hard to believe a random desk jockey is the one to take down a thousand years of training.

There are other problems with the film of course.  There's the obvious weirdness about McAvoy's skills being genetic enough so that he can shoot the wings off a fly instantaneously but he can't just get out into the field.  There's also the fact that every character other than Wesley is woefully underwritten, to the point where when Angelina Jolie pulls out the dead father card, you feel like she's borrowing the speech from another of her movies.  Jolie is watchable in a movie-star-sort-of-way in every action movie you can think of, but between Wanted and Salt, I get the sense that she really doesn't know how to pick out a decent action adventure and am hoping that she sticks to dramas going forward, or at least has whomever picked Mr. and Mrs. Smith on-board to help select the film.  Morgan Freeman, the only other big name actor at the time, has a gravitas in everything he does, but this is really underwritten and he doesn't get too much juiciness, particularly since we don't get a moment of questioning why he would be so foolish as to, in the film's final scene, go into Wesley's place-of-work to kill him, knowing full well that it could be a trap.

This final scene, however, illustrates the worst part of the movie: Wesley is a jackass.  I can't recall seeing an action movie with a less likable protagonist.  At the beginning of the film he's wasting his life, somehow trying to seem like not only everyone at home, but also a common man, but he's a lot less than the common man.  He's someone that doesn't even care that his girlfriend is cheating on him, that he works a job that he's not good at and where his boss treats him like garbage.  Then he's impetuous about being an assassin, a job he only has because of his DNA.  And finally, in the film's final fourth-wall breaking scene he condescendingly asks the audience what "they have done lately," never having enough self-awareness to realize everything he did was because it was handed to him.  McAvoy doesn't modulate any of this jerk-like nature, he exacerbates it, perhaps because the ambitious young Scot doesn't relate to such a loser.  I generally like McAvoy in pretty much everything, but this is a bad performance, coupled with a pretty lousy American accent (note to British actors: don't just flatten your accent when you move here, you have to have some sort of regional dialect to go with your voice), and shows that he's just not meant to play someone unlikable and make them at least relatable.  He looks wicked hot, but like so many women in Transformers movies have found out, that's not really enough to carry a movie.

The film received two Oscar nominations, both in the sound categories.  I have a feeling it gained both nominations due to the whooshing of the bullets, an admittedly eye-catching (if ludicrously over-produced) effect, as well as for the bevy of Oscar friendly names associated with the film's sound-work (2-time winner Chris Jenkins, along with 7-time nominees Wylie Stateman and Frank Montano), as the rest of the sound is mostly music and crashing trains, nothing particularly noteworthy or special going on here.

All-in-all, with just one film left before we kick off the 2008 OVP, I'm feeling like I might have chosen duds to end the race with, but what do you think?  Anyone want to stick up for Wanted (it was a hit back in the day, so someone must like it)?  Where does this rank on your personal James McAvoy favorites list?  And when compared to the likes of The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, WALL-E, Iron Man, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where does the sound-work in this picture rank?