Wanted

Funny story. In 2003, there was this comic series called Wanted by Mark Millar
and J.G. Jones. And it was pretty brilliant, actually.


So, by the end of issue 2, someone or other has decided they've got to film it.
So scriptwriters are hired, treatments are done, etc, and the project gets
greenlit. Unfortunately, Mark Millar's day job is to manage the Ultimate line at
Marvel, and so Wanted got put on the back burner for a while. Long story short,
the script for this movie got written without the writer having read 2/3 of the
story. So when the movie diverges from the book 1/3 of the way in, that's why.

So, Wanted, the comic book, is this mean-spirited riff on superheroes and
supervillains; sometime in the mid eighties, the supervillians won, setting off
a device that altered reality, such that no-one remembers that superheroes ever
existed, including the superheroes. The supervillains then go underground, rule
the world, and make the world the shitty place you see around you today.

The scriptwriter didn't know any of that, it seems. All he knew was the
protagonist, Wesley Gibson, is plucked out of his depressing life, and inducted
into a shadowy organisation called The Fraternity, on the basis of his having
super-abilities like his father's. Now, in the book, these abilities are
basically Matrix style gun-fu, as they are in the film. However, in the book,
there's the whole range of supervillains you see in the comics, whereas the
film takes the view that everyone is a Matrix-gun-fu assassin, working for this
order of assassins called The Fraternity, and the plot takes a left into the
video game Assassin's Creed.

Is it any good? No, sadly. It's got its moments, of course, most films do, most
of which come in the first half hour. After that, it's just portentous gabble.
At one point, I suddenly realised that they'd managed to make shooting people,
driving fast cars and snogging Angelina Jolie boring. How do you do that? The
plot then drives relentlessly though the basic revenge, betrayal and blah blah
blah.

Flat direction, flat performances, and a pretty limp script add up to an
only-just watchable movie, with a couple of scenes that manage to buck the
trend and be genuinely entertaining.

Buy the book, though, that's really funny, and warped.