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IN
another universe, the film Wanted would have
elicited gasps and awe not in wonderment but in
disbelief. In this film, assassins are born and not
made, rediscovered and not punished. A young accountant,
Wesley Gibson—played by James McAvoy, whose recent
talent is imbuing loose charm to an otherwise quiet film
about atonement—is a daily loser. His boss, a
harridan-cum-ball buster, stalks his everyday
performance. The female boss makes it her duty to remind
the young man how hopeless and helpless he is. To add to
this misery, the young man’s live-in girlfriend is
carrying on an affair with his officemate passing
himself off as friend.
One day,
in the store, the loser finds himself in the middle of a
shooting incident. A woman with nails like claw and
countenance closer to an elegant monkey-eating eagle
disguised as a fashion model appears from nowhere. She
declares herself through action and pout as his guardian
as she battles it out with a man, himself elegant as if
having stepped out of the GQ cover for fall, who is
supposed to be after the life of the accountant.
The
fight does not end at the store. It goes on and on like
an all-out war between two warring factions even as the
shootout involves technically just two persons. Remember
that the accountant is there screaming for his dear life
and wondering what has happened to his boring routine.
We soon
find ourselves in the middle of a car chase that has not
happened lately in feature films. The closest connection
of the car chase is the James Bond flick but its
intimate kinship can really be traced in those animation
entertainments of yore, where anthropomorphic animals
get their faces smashed in, their entire bodies
flattened by bulldozers, nonetheless coming out of the
incident, well, flat but alive.
This is
no surprise because we are watching Timur Bekmambetov’s
initial foray into Hollywood by way of a story based
upon a comic-book miniseries of the same name by Mark
Millar.
The
director comes from that area and film industry we
generically dismiss as Russian. Born in Kazakhstan, the
director’s claim to fame include working with Roger
Corman in a straight-to-video Escape From Afghanistan
and the cult-hit film Night Watch and its sequel
Day Watch. After Wanted, Bekmambetov would
have to shuck out those previous outings for this film,
about a secret society of assassins, has become his
de-facto claim to raging fame.
Action
films will never be the same again after Wanted.
The action scenes are incredible, fabulous and
extravagantly whimsical. On the surface, Wanted
is an action film but it is really a closeted epic work,
with inspiration coming all the way from the ancient
tales of heroes. Instead of codes, there is a loom that
renders oracle and judgment and assignment all at the
same time. Like the tales of yore, the hero finds out
late in his journey that he is killing not the enemy but
someone else.
What can
James McAvoy not do in film? As Gibson, he makes the
transformation from a drone to a daredevil in a few
minutes and we are with him. He goes through the most
ludicrous of initiations but we know his make is mythic.
We want to be kind to him as an actor, but I must admit
another epic character steals the story from McAvoy’s
Gibson—that of Fox.
With a
name like Fox, how can you lose?
Angelina
Jolie is Fox and she is part-caricature,
part-tragedienne. Everything about her is wide and big:
gestures, lips, emotion. She bends her body as the train
goes through the tunnel. She glares and creates fire on
screen. She kisses McAvoy and you check your pulse rate.
She walks naked and you dismiss your ideologies about
the human form.
In my
generation, we would come out of the moviehouse to tell
each other how the whole film was really impossible. In
Wanted, this response malfunctions.
It will
work in Made of Honor. The critical eye functions
in this film about a man, handsome and elegant and rich,
who discovers that he is capable of being in love. That
the woman he loves is really that female who accompanies
him in his spare time and knows what he does in other
spare times.
Julia
Roberts and Dermot Mulroney have worked their charms in
an earlier template, My Best Friend’s Wedding,
and some of us have not recovered yet from the
bittersweetness of that enterprise. In that film,
Roberts can lay claim to a great portion of the charm
and salvation.
Now, two
actors are going to try the well-tested path: Michelle
Monaghan, lovely and looking like an intelligent woman,
and Patrick Dempsey. Monaghan is strong but with enough
vulnerability to make us run to embrace her and whatever
character she is playing. As Hannah, the girl who
understands this man who does not understand himself,
Monaghan has enough heartbreak under those faint
freckles to make us imagine that love can be an
adventure.
Dempsey
is Dempsey. He is a current icon, the man impossibly
charming but who, in this film, tries to be a loser. As
Thomas Bailey, Dempsey can never be the loser. There are
millions of incurable romantics—and fans—out there and
they are not prepared for a film noir starring Dr.
McDreamy, the nom de romance of Dempsey in the TV series
Grey’s Anatomy.
Barring
the landscape of Scotland that threatens to swallow all
cars and other moving objects and the last appearance of
Sydney Pollack as the father of Tom, the film soon loses
its steam and love scent toward the end. Even before the
bouquet is thrown, we know the decision of the jury:
give me a tale of assassins any time. Throw in a
spa-like setting where bodies heal from all wounds
except those caused by love and some such things.
The film
Made of Honor is directed by Paul Weilland.
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