Wanted: one secret agenda

Cyber war has raged about the possible message of Wanted. But who's right? And what's the real motivation for the film-maker - and his critics?

In the firing line ... Angelina Jolie in Wanted

Summertime popcorn actioners don't normally prompt intellectual outrage. Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted has managed to. In various journalistic, audiovisual and blogospheric quarters, it's been trashed as misogynist, fascistic and an insult to its audience's intelligence.

Nonetheless, the complaint that a comic-book-based fantasy should have a fantastic plot itself seems a challenge to credulity. So, our accountant hero is inducted into a thousand-year-old assassination cult by Angelina Jolie down at the supermart. Doesn't happen every day, but how often do gauche newspapermen transform themselves into supermen in telephone boxes? The effrontery with which Bekmambetov flaunts the conventions of the genre is one of his film's many strengths. Any disbelief suspension deficiency is the filmgoer's problem, not his.

Oddly, critics have had particular difficulty with the idea that it's a self-styled "ordinary and pathetic" character who metamorphoses into the superhero. Since its earliest days, Hollywood has liked to indulge the little guy's dream that he might break free from his workaday bonds and, as this film puts it, "release the caged lion" inside him.

Bekmambetov took the trouble to check that this dream actually exists. He told LA Weekly's Ella Taylor that he'd talked to a lot of young Americans, and found their imaginations "very bloody, very violent". Whatever. It's the little guy who pays for the movie ticket. He knows that all he's buying is six dollars' worth of escapism. This film's overt reminder that this is so is one of its cheeky charms, not some kind of haughty sneer at its audience.

The misogyny charge is puzzling. Sure, a fat workplace bully who happens to be female gets a bullet through her doughnut, a peculiarly benign form of retribution compared to what's visited on the film's other reprobates. However, it's Jolie's character who's the film's martial arts star, its central beacon of virtue and a lofty mentor to James McAvoy's stumbling uncaged lion. When it's time for her to be dispatched, the camera discreetly averts its gaze, denying the audience the glow of sadism engendered by the gory carnage inflicted on the film's male casualties. Are we to view Kill Bill as propaganda for misandry?

A clue as to what's triggered this misplaced repugnance may lie in those cries of "fascism". It's entirely reasonable to wonder about the social impact of the message that ultra-violence should be inflicted on evil-doers, and that it's highly satisfying to do the inflicting. However, this is of course a question posed not just by this film but by a huge chunk of Hollywood's, not to speak of videogaming's, output, and indeed legends that long predate both.

Wanted is not to blame for the Iraq war, even if generic predecessors may have played their part in its genesis. In fact, its central theme is that the motto "Kill one and perhaps save a thousand" corrupts people who adopt it. The fate of those who misdirect slaughter in this fable is one that most of its critics would surely relish seeing Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld endure.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it's the sheer excellence of Wanted that's made it the focus of such egregious opprobrium. Direction, plotting and acting are top-notch. If the film's dialogue is outlandishly leaden, that's surely a dry nod to its comic-book provenance. Perhaps the righteous can stomach primary-colour allegory only so long as it knows its primitive place. If so, that's their loss, not ours. [The Guardian]

Read More......

Interview: The Writers Behind Wanted

Screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, on adapting comics like Wanted and working on The A-Team.

The latest comic book to translate to the big screen, Wanted stars James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, a fumbling cube-dweller going nowhere in his personal and professional life. That is, until he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), a member of a secret assassin society, who tells Wesley his destiny lies with them and he must avenge his estranged father’s death by learning the ways of the Fraternity. With nowhere else to go, Wesley joins the mysterious group and trains in the art of knife-fighting, code-reading and firing off curving bullets. Far fetched? Maybe, but in the hands of effects savant director Timur Bekmambatov (the hugely successful Night Watch movies), it’s even more entertaining that way.

Screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (3:10 to Yuma, 2 Fast 2 Furious) adaptated Mark Millar’s nail-biting graphic novel series, and we “wanted” to see how exactly they tackled the task.

Fandango: Were you the first writers on Wanted?
Michael Brandt: We were the first writers, and we were the last writers, and there were a couple of writers in between, one of whom was Chris Morgan, who we share credit with, who did a lot of really good work on it. The same Universal executive we worked with on 2 Fast gave us the first issue of the comic when it came out. We were really fascinated by the main character of Wesley.

Fandango: Were the rights for a movie actually picked up as the comic was being published?
Brandt: Correct. I think it was going to be a six-ssue graphic novel, and Universal picked it up as the first issue was being published. From the first issue, they decided they wanted to go find a director.

Fandango: I'm sure you’re aware that the comic book community is very concerned about the assassins being super-villains. The movie version could have gone in another direction, but following the first issue, you're very close to the comic book.
Brandt: Really, the first two issues, that's the first act of the movie. There are some things that happen later in the comic that we either anticipated or incorporated, so it doesn't detour entirely. It detours in terms of worlds, but we picked up things as the comic went along.

Fandango: Wanted belongs to a certain style of comic book that uses variants of known characters or archetypes, like Watchmen or Authority. To a comic book audience, that makes sense, but I think it was probably wise not to go with the masks and capes to tell this particular story.
Brandt: The first issue of the comic book was very nihilistic; it had a very strong theme. And that's the best part. It's not the fact that's it's a spoof, it's not that there's guys in capes. The studio is not going to make an R-rated movie with people in capes that's kind of spoofy.
Derek Haas: We wanted an R-rated movie. The studio wouldn't be able to market a men-in-tights-and-capes hard R movie, because kids are going to get excited about tights and capes, and then they wouldn't be able to see the movie, and we would have to tone it down to PG-13. We wanted to keep the tone of the comic, so hard R suits our world.

Fandango: There are a lot of colorful, and colorfully named, characters in the comic, like Mr. Rictus and Johnny Two Dicks, but most of them did not make the transition. By my count, only three made a straight transition to the film.
Brandt: Wesley and Fox.

Fandango: And Wesley's girlfriend, right?
Brandt: Wesley's girlfriend, plus his friend from the office who we named Barry. Our character of Sloan is an amalgamation of Rictus from the comic book, but it's definitely not a straight lift. I want to be clear about something here. When you're hired to adapt something as a screenwriter, you have to find what it is about that thing that talks to you, and you have to make it your own, and you can't just regurgitate it back in movie form. To get something like Wanted, that is so specific in its voice, across in movie form, you've got to make tough decisions. Derek and I decided that Millar's theme in the book, and what Millar was ultimately saying about what it's like to be a disenfranchised youth, what it's like to find something in the world that's important to you, was more important than Johnny Two Dicks, or any of those characters.

Fandango: As screenwriters, is there a certain glee in discovering who is going to be playing the characters? For example, Morgan Freeman.
Brandt: That was the single best piece of casting for Derek and me, simply because we were having trouble trying to describe who the Fraternity are and how they work and what their history is. As soon as Morgan Freeman says those words, "We are a fraternity of assassins, we are here to keep balance in the world," because Morgan Freeman has so much weight, and so much history behind him, you believe him as an audience. He could say that the sky is green and the grass is blue, and down is up, and you'd believe him. That gave us a lot of leeway. We were actually able to cut a lot of description and dialogue, because Morgan could just say "Here's the deal."

Fandango: You were probably also then given the freedom to craft the character to match his very smooth cadence, and rely upon the fact that his presence would communicate in ways something that words can't.
Brandt: Exactly, writing to his cadence was a lot of fun.

Fandango: James McAvoy has said in the casting process, he was sort of the oddball out of all the other actors, but eventually he was chosen. Was that decision based upon the direction the script was going, a more diminutive, shyer character?
Brandt: The comic is done to look like Eminem, and there was a lot of talk about Eminem doing it...

Fandango: That's what I was getting to.
Brandt: That was fairly obvious to us that was what Millar intended. You know, as much as Eminem would have been great, it would have been a very different movie. It was important for the Wesley character to be someone who is very put-upon in the beginning of the movie, and who has to rise up to the challenge. The great thing about McAvoy is he can do that. He can play the nerdy, nebbishy kind of guy in the beginning, and then in the end, when he pulls out guns and he's kicking ass, it plays too. It was really a strong casting choice by Universal.

Fandango: What about the envious chore of giving action and voice to Ms. Angelina Jolie? In the comic book, her character of Fox is obviously patterned off of Catwoman, and specifically, Halle Berry's portrayal of her.
Brandt: We [originally] wrote the character to be much more like the comic book. She kind of had that feminine, sexual wildness to her that Fox from the comic book had. Then, when Angelina was cast, she had one set of very specific notes, which were that she didn't think her character would talk very much. She wanted to play it cool and calm and more like a drill sergeant. She specifically referenced An Officer and a Gentleman. She wanted to be the person in the background with her arms folded, watching Wesley train. So, we rewrote the character to serve her, and when you watch the movie, you can see that she can do so much more with her eyes, just standing there, watching, than she can with her dialogue, and we were very happy that was the choice that she made.

Fandango: Your action scenes are very detailed. Is that something you do as a writing team, or are one of you more action oriented, and the other is more dialogue oriented?
Brandt: Derek writes everything and I just make sure the punctuation is correct.
Haas: We pass scripts back and forth 20 times before we turn it into the studio, so I can't even tell anymore what I've done and what Michael's done, but we never think that one writes the action and one writes the dialogue. We try as each of us takes their turn to keep elevating it, and keep surprising each other. And if you can come up with something novel and unique, then that wins in the script. So all those action sequences were just both of us trying to outdo each other.

Fandango: Is there talk of Wanted 2?
Brandt: There's talk.

Fandango: Have you started to talk to Mark Millar or anyone else about it?
Brandt: No.

Fandango: In the time since you did most of the writing of Wanted, you've had another movie come out, and you've been announced as writing a TV show adaptation, two novel adaptations and making your directorial debut. Let's start with 3:10 to Yuma. A western really stands out from your other projects as a genre, but perhaps fits in more thematically with your other films—except maybe not Catch That Kid.
Brandt: Actually, it fits in more with Catch That Kid than 2 Fast 2 Furious. What gets us excited about movies is the journey of the main character. Even with Catch That Kid, the girl's dad was sick, and she was doing what she could to save him. What was exciting about writing 3:10 to Yuma, long before anyone was cast and we could even dream of working with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, was the idea of a father and a son on the road together with a famous gunslinger who the son appreciates more than his own father. And it applies in Wanted too, where Wesley is avenging the death of his own father, who is someone he's never known in his life. So, believe it or not, writing across genres is not as important as finding that one theme that you can connect with as a writer.

Fandango: One of the projects that you are working is one of the most anticipated films in the past decade. It's up there with the fourth Indiana Jones and the Star Wars prequels. The A-Team. Seriously, whenever I've covered A-Team news, web traffic just skyrockets.
Brandt: That's a lot of pressure!

Fandango: It’s a beloved television program. Each of the four characters has a very defined role. Are you writing them in the voices of the original actors, or are you thinking more about who might be playing them in the 21st century?
Brandt: It's a little different. We're imagining the characters as we want to see them on the screen. In our minds, we want to take what was good about the "A-Team" TV show, which was these four people who represented the four branches of the Army: intelligence, artillery, aviation and the infantry, and say, what's the down- and-dirty version? What can we do to avoid being campy and cheap? Hopefully, they cast the kind of intense actors who will bring these characters to life.

Fandango: Will it be an origin film?
Brandt: Yes. We're going to see the team come together. I don't want to give away the ending. It ends with what the TV show starts with, pretty much.

Fandango: So, it's a prequel.
Brandt: Yeah.

Fandango: There are so many trademark "A-Team" lines and themes, like "I love it when a plan comes together." Do you feel pressure to put all of that in one film? Is there a balance you have to find?
Brandt: We try to use the ones we want to use in a cognizant way, so when they do come out, it comes across as the cool version, instead of the campy version. I should also note that we were rewriters on this movie. We weren't the original writers. I don't want to take credit away from the other guys who started the process. Our goal was to move away from campy, like "Starsky and Hutch," and more towards the Casino Royale version.

Fandango: One novel that you are adapting is Deceit by James Siegel, who wrote the novel that Derailed was based upon. It involves a journalist whose situation is similar to Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. How's that going?
Brandt: It's going very well. The studio is very high on it. We think it can be in the vein of Michael Clayton; it's got a great hook. Like you say, it's about a reporter who has a reputation for telling lies, and now he comes across a giant story, and he's the boy who cried wolf. He's known for making up 40 stories for the New York Times, so how does this guy overcome his stigma and cover this story, when no one will believe him?

Fandango: You also have The Matarese Circle, which is about a CIA agent and a KGB agent who have to team up to uncover some sort of conspiracy.
Brandt: You have it close. The KGB was the '70s, so we had to update it a bit to make it current. They hate each other, but because of this outside force, they have to team up.

Fandango: And finally, I'm sure you want to talk about Countdown, which Michael, you’re directing, and you both are writing and producing.
Brandt: Yeah, we’re currently casting. It's a psychological thriller with action elements, based upon a Richard Matheson short story from the 1950s. It's one of those great "Twilight Zone" ideas, about space explorers who land on a planet, and when they get off, they discover their own ship has crashed, and they find their own dead bodies. They realize they're looking at their future, and so it becomes a movie about avoiding your own fate, can you change who you really are to avoid your own fate? It should be a really interesting puzzle that the audience can ride along with the characters. It should be really fun.

Send feedback on this column to editorial@fandango.com.

Read More......

Movie Review: Wanted

You could gargle bitumen and bin-juice for half an hour, and it couldn't leave a nastier taste in your mouth than this macho action thriller about a secret fraternity of assassins. It is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, evidently brought over to Hollywood on the strength of his wildly successful Russian movies like Day Watch. The stars are Angelina Jolie, sporting her now familiar default smirk, and our own James McAvoy stepping up to his first A-list role. The spectacle of their strange gym-built bodies, variously starved and pumped, and the boring, risk-free digital "stunts", can't distract you from just how dreary and insidious the whole business is. It looks as if it has been written by a committee of 13-year-old boys for whom penetrative sex is still only a rumour, and the resulting movie plays like a party political broadcast on behalf of the misogynist party.

James McAvoy plays Wes, an ordinary nerdy guy who has an office job which totally sucks. He's pathetic, a loser, on medication for anxiety attacks, of all the spurious and ridiculous ailments. His best friend is a bullying jock who is boning Wes's whiney and nagging girlfriend on the sly, and incidentally adding insult to injury by mooching cash off Wes for the necessary contraceptive materials. But Wes's untermensch life is turned around when Angelina Jolie pops up out of nowhere in a drugstore, saves Wes from a mysterious, spectacular attempt on his life, and shoves the gibbering soon-to-be-ex-nerd into her flashy automobile for a crash-bang chase along the city freeway, exchanging fire with the gunman.

Wes is evidently hated by the forces of darkness because, quite without knowing it, he is a ninja of topping people; his own father, a master assassin whom he never knew, has just been killed by the shadowy opposition. It is his fate to be a master killer, and it is the job of Jolie - known simply as "Fox" -to force him to step up, to accept his destiny and enter the Fraternity, a secret society of bespoke killers dedicated to taking out important bad guys. The Fraternity hides out inside what looks like a castle modelled on Balmoral, disguised as a community of weavers.

Their super-sexy way of shooting people - apart, obviously, from the usual technique of doing it with outstretched arm, gun tilted 90 degrees, face insouciantly pointing away from the victim - is to use a special bullet with corkscrew grooving. This, and a slight whiplash with the shooting arm, will cause the bullet to curve round corners, a setpiece which perhaps shows the influence of David Beckham. Wes of course blossoms into an alpha-male, and even gets some liplock action with Angelina, which looks like he's snogging a singed sofa.

Weirdly, though, it is Wes's pre-heroic life which is given the most passion by Bekmambetov. None of the violence and the action have a fraction of the beady-eyed intensity with which the director invests the moment where Wes quits his job and tells his boss to shove it. Because his boss is a fat ugly woman. This horrible bitch is always snapping at him and she gets her comeuppance in a big way, her obesity being a clear sign that she's asking to be brought low and laughed at. Her existence is briefly reprised at the end of the film, when one of Wes's bullets whistles through the doughnut she's gobbling.

I have to say I don't think I've seen a film recently which expresses hatred of women quite so openly, and fervently, as this one. In a way, Wes's boss is the most vivid female character in the film, more powerfully and pointedly conceived than the others: more than Wes's horrible, duplicitous girlfriend, who gets to be humiliated by seeing Wes kissing Fox and more than Fox herself, who is basically an honorary male. This is a film where womankind is represented by irrelevant sleek babes and obese comic foils, an ugly whorehouse aesthetic which really does sock over its contempt for femaleness very, very powerfully indeed.

Perhaps it's absurd to worry in these terms about a silly, disposable movie like this. And yet I can't help thinking that if a film treated any ethnic group the way this treats women, it would find itself in pretty hot water. And it's sad to see Angelina Jolie, a performer with style - who moreover did the assassin role with considerably more wit and charm in Mr and Mrs Smith - trundled out for this piffle. It's also sad to see James McAvoy offer an IQ-discount in a similar way. In an ideal world, the title would have the word "Not" tacked on to the front.

reviewed by Peter Bradshaw, published at http://film.guardian.co.uk

Read More......

Upcoming Movie: "Wanted"

Genre: Action, Fantasy, Thriller
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Common, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp,
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Producer: Marc E. Platt, Jim Lemley, Jason Netter, Iain Smith
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Release Date: June 27, 2008
Writer: Chris Morgan, Derek Haas, Michael Brandt based on series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones


Synopsis
Based upon Mark Millar's explosive graphic novel series and helmed by the stunning visualist director Timur Bekmambetov—creator of the most successful Russian film franchise in history, the Night Watch series—Wanted tells the story of one invisible drone's transformation into a dark avenger. In 2008, the world will be introduced to a superhero for a new millennium: Wesley Gibson.

25-year-old account manager Wes (James McAvoy) was the most pathetic, cube-dwelling hypochondriac the planet had ever known. His boss chewed him out hourly, his girlfriend cheated on him daily and his life plodded on interminably. Everyone was certain this weakling would never amount to anything. There was little else for Wes to do but wile away the days and die a slow, clock-punching death.

Until he met a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie).

After his estranged father is murdered, the deadly sexy Fox recruits Wes into the Fraternity, a secret society that trains Wes to avenge his dad's death by unlocking his dormant powers. As she teaches him how to develop lightning-quick reflexes and phenomenal agility, Wes discovers this team lives by an ancient, unbreakable code: carry out the death orders given by fate itself.

With wickedly brilliant tutors—including the Fraternity's enigmatic leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman)—Wes grows to enjoy all the strength he ever wanted. But, slowly, he begins to realize there is more to his dangerous associates than meets the eye. And as he wavers between newfound heroism and vengeance, Wes will come to learn what no one could ever teach him: he alone controls his destiny.

Read More......