Film Review: Wanted

My Wanted review is now up at Donewaiting.com. This is, of course, the big summer movie based on obscure 1947 crime series Wanted Comics:







Angelina Jolie plays the guy in the top hat.

Wanted and race

As comics fans will find this Friday, the film Wanted falls closer to From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentleman than to 300 or 30 Days of Night, in terms of how closely it adapts its comic book source material. Like those two bowdlerized versions of Alan Moore books, Wanted bears so little resemblance to its source that its somewhat puzzling that the studio bothered adapting it at all, instead of just giving it an original name.

Gone are the supervillains and superheroes, the costumes, most of the characters, the worldwide conspiracy controlling the nature of reality, the amorality, the metafictional aspects and, um, the plot. All director Timur Bekmambetov and his three-man screen-writing team keep are the title, the names of two characters, and two brief scenes (Wesley shooting flies with a gun; Wesley shooting corpses on meat hooks).

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Neither, really; it’s just an observation (For an assessment of the virtues of the film, I should have a review up at Donewaiting.com on Thursday afternoon).

I think losing so much of it—particularly the superhero/supervillain content and the big idea that the DCU multiverse is really real and the real world is really a fiction, but Lex Luthor and company made us think the opposite—loses what makes Wanted Wanted, but it doesn’t necessarily make the movie itself bad (or good).

The moral point of view of the movie is also almost opposite of that expressed in the comic; the film’s Wesley is a bit arrogant and a total badass assassin, but he’s still the hero; he’s not a murderer, rapist and villain, as he is in the comic.

Movie-Wesley also isn’t a racist.

Is Comic Book-Wesley? I’m not sure, but the case can certainly be made that he is. Or, at the very least, that the white character has some issues with characters with darker skin than his. Or should the case be made that it is the character’s creator, the guy filling his head with thoughts and his mouth with words, who has some issues?

I hadn’t reread Wanted since it’s release about four years ago, and, when I reread it last week after seeing the film, I was pretty shocked at some of the ways race plays out in the book.

During 2006’s Civil War, Millar wrote a scene in which a clone of an Aryan, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Norse god murdered a black hero, and some folks jokingly pointed out the symbolism online. While I was a little bummed about Goliath getting killed, and thought the scene was a turning point for the quality of the series, I certainly didn’t see anything racist, intentionally or unintentionally, about it.

In Kick-Ass, the third issue of which was just released a few weeks ago, Millar has a white kid playing vigilante attack some black kids in the first issue, fight some Puerto Ricans in the second issue and then attack some black dudes in the third issue. I gave up on the series due to its exceptionally poor writing, but simply attributed the white guy-fighting-minorities story thread as tone deafness on Millar’s part, akin to his clumsy, out-of-touch pop culture references and complete divorce from how the human body responds to punishment.

But the questionable aspects of Wanted are harder to dismiss.

Here’s a scene from #3, in which the leaders of the five crime families meet, and neo-Nazi supervillain The Future tells off Vandal Sava—er, Adam One:

Now, The Future is not just a supervillain, but he’s a Nazi supervillain, so the fact that this evil jerk is also racist hardly seems like a shock or surprise. He also complains that he was promised the Jews by his fellow evil rulers of the world, and, in the very next panel there, talks about how women fantasize about being raped by fascists.

So yeah, not a good guy. Him hurling racist epithets is pretty much to be expected.

But what about this? Here’s Wesley narrating a scene from #1:

I’m not sure what to make of this scene. He points out that she’s African-American in the narration, and in the next sentence says “I’m embarrassed by the situation.” Embarrassed that he’s being yelled? Or that he’s being yelled at by his “African-American boss” as he says, or that he has an “African-American boss” at all?

I don’t know. But including the words “African-American” to the narration at all encourages one of the latter readings. The art clearly indicates that the woman he’s talking about is African-American, so why redundantly mention her race if he was only embarrassed by the fact that he was taking shit from his boss?

Then, two panels later:

The meaning of the word “cholo” has changed over the years, but is apparently most often used to refer to poor Mexicans or immigrants from anywhere south of the U.S. border these days.

And in #2, there’s this:

I’m not sure what he means by “Spike Lee extra;” is he simply referring to New Yorkers? Because that’s kind of a weird thing to say: “On the way home from work tonight, every New Yorker in the entire fucking world will have spat on my back again.” What does that even me?

Or does he mean “black guy,” like the guys in the panel seem to be?

After Wesley is recruited by the supervillains of The Fraternity and butches up, we get this charming sequence, which is an awful lot like the scene at the climax of Kick-Ass #1:

So Wesley’s a racist, even if he uses softer terms like “Spike Lee extra” and “African-American” instead of dropping N-bombs or terms as crass as The Future used.

That by itself wouldn’t be all that troubling either, as Wesley is, like The Future, a villain too. One of the subversive aspects of Wanted the comic book is that it’s a superhero book without any real superheroes; just villains. Wesley’s a better supervillain only in that he’s smarter and tougher than the other villains, and that he rapes women instead of children and animals, like The Joker Mr. Rictus.

Complicating that reading, however, is this panel:

Wesley’s boss isn’t a supervillain. She’s just a civilian, one who appears in about two panels of the whole six-issue series. And she’s giving Wesley shit, not about his job performance, but about being white. She unfairly stereotypes Wesley as being a member of the KKK and having a small dick just because he’s white.

I don’t understand this panel at all. What’s Millar trying to say? That she’s racist too, and that there aren’t really any innocent civilians in the world? Because it’s a weird example. One would imagine she wouldn’t be able to be in any kind of position of authority if she was always publicly ridiculing her white underlings for their whiteness, you know?

The only other black character in the book is Catwom—er, Halle Berr—er, The Fox, and while she has substantially more panel-time than, say, The Professor or Mr. Rictus, her character is hardly more developed: She likes having sex (to the point that she regards both Gibsons as life support systems for their cocks, which is all she’s interested in about them), she likes money, she likes killing people and she never, ever lets her nouns and verbs or tenses agree.

Considering these scenes, it’s understandable why the filmmakers wouldn’t want to stay too faithful to the source material—some of it is pretty ugly, and would give the film a lot more baggage than anyone would reasonably want to invest millions of dollars into lugging around in public.

Mark Millar: Still just comic book-famous, or famous-famous?

Today The Incredible Hulk opens in theaters, and in just two short weeks the next of this summer’s many based-on-a-comic-book movies will see release: Wanted, Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation of Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’ 2003 Top Cow miniseries of the same name.

See this?

That’s a pass for a preview screening of the film. In most media markets of a certain side, they do preview screenings of movies, to ensure reviews and coverage the weekend of release, as well as word-of-mouth. For studio movies, this usually entails an evening screening in a big theater house, with critics mixed in with a large crowd.

The studios hire local or regional advertising and/or PR firms to organize these, and they in turn usually partner with a local media institution like (newspaper, radio station, TV station) to distribute these passes. Sometimes those media will then partner with a local business to help them distribute passes. For example, when I worked for a local altweekly, our advertising people would get a stack of passes that they would give to a business to give away, usually trying to find a business whose clientele would be likely to appreciate the film (For example, if the movie were based on a video game, they might approach a video game store; for one based on a comic book, they might approach a comic book store, and so on).

The passes usually look like the one in the picture there. On one side, is a version of the movie poster, and on the reverses is all of the pertinent info about the screening—when and where it is, how many it’s good for, some fine print regarding not recording it on your cell phone camera and posting it on the Internet, et cetera.

Sometimes, they contain a little bit of info about the film. That’s the case with Wanted.
(Above: This is what the pass looks like in Looking Glass Land).

There’s a little paragraph about the movie, and I found the phrasing of this paragraph about Wanted to be kind of interesting, from an inside-comics-fandom-looking-out perspective, anyway.

It’s just two sentences long:

Based upon Mark Millar’s explosive graphic novel series and helmed by stunning visualist director Timur Bekmambetov—creator of the most successful Russian film franchise in history—Wanted tells the tale of one apathetic nobody’s transformation as he is introduced to a new life and new powers that he never knew existed. In 2008, the world will be introduced to a hero for a new generation: Wesley Gibson.

We’ve all noticed the increasing mainstream acceptance of comics and comics culture over the last decade or so, something that seemed so gradual for so long, and suddenly, BOOM! the rest of the world suddenly started caring about this art form we’re all so passionate about.

Now terminology has always been a problem in discussing comics/comix/graphic novels/sequential art, and we seem to have settled on “graphic novel” through usage, but it’s kinda problematic, particularly if one cares to sit down and start to draw lines separating around what a graphic novel is and what it isn’t. (Is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman a graphic novel, or a series of graphic novels, or a comic book series? Technically, it’s a comic book series, right? But when the comics are collected into a trade, then it becomes a graphic novel and, hell, collect the graphic novels into a giant omnibus, and suddenly it’s only two graphic novels).

Anyway, Wanted is referred to as a “graphic novel series,” which it isn’t. It’s a comic book series. It was published in six single floppy, stapled, spine-less issues. You could call it a graphic novel, if “comic book” or “comic book series” bears negative connotations—I’m fascinated at the acceptance comics have when referred to as “graphic novels” as opposed to “comic books”—since it has since been collected into a trade paperback format, with a spine and binding and a single cover and all. But to call it a series of graphic novels, you’d have to argue that each and every single issue of it was a graphic novel, and I don’t think one can argue that.

The other thing I found interesting, the thing that actually made me thin there was a post in this at all, was that it mentioned writer Mark Millar, but not artist J.G. Jones.

Now, the credits for the film—the one’s that appear on the poster, anyway—says “Based on the series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones,” but Jones’ name isn’t on the paragraph on the other side of the pass above.

That indicates that whoever composed that paragraph thought Millar’s name was more important than Jones’. This surprised me, because I was under the impression that neither of the creators were names that anyone outside of comics would have ever even heard of, let alone be a selling point. Millar might be one of the biggest—and best selling, I’m sure he’d eagerly point out—names in the North American comics industry, but if you don’t read comics (or read about them) would you have ever even heard of him?

I’m not singling Millar out; Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis are among the best-selling and most popular writers alongside Millar, but does anyone who’s never seen the inside of a comic book shop know who the hell they are? Hell, even Neil Gaiman’s mainstream name recognition is at this point far stronger for his non-comics work than his comics work; folks who don’t read comics still know the fantasy author who wrote Coraline and Stardust.

Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, maybe Will Eisner, probably Jack Kirby and Harvey Pekar and now Marjane Satrapi, those are names folks outside comics would easily recognize as comics creators. But Millar? This is the first movie based on his work. He hasn’t written for other media the way, say, Neil Gaiman has. I know some of Millar’s work has gotten mainstream media attention—particularly Civil War—but it’s always been in the context of look what Marvel’s doing with their Marvel heroes, not look what This One Writer is doing.

Were those sorts of articles enough to jack his Q-rating up high enough that name-checking him in a one-paragraph description of Wanted makes a lot of sense?

Perhaps.

If so, though, I find it pretty surprising.