Wesley: [narrating] Six weeks ago I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you. Who am I now? ... Who am I now? This is not me fulfilling my destiny. This is not me following in my father's footsteps. This is definitely not me saving the world.
Ok, I was in two minds about watching this flick. On the second day after work I couldn't face the thought of leaving my desk, getting into my car and driving home to the same mess as I had done for two weeks. Granted the flu has made my life interminably boring the last 10 days.
On the first day of my slide into dizzying, sniffy slobbering I had to rescue my landlady from her safe - after three guys (pals of the ex-gardener) let themselves into the house and beat her face to a tomato twice its original size. I don't know how I escaped becoming a punch-bag, maybe it's because I gave someone outside a freebie last week (2 days before the burglary) - a black hat with the words THE WEEKENDER on it. I dunno. All I know is I am not making this up, I've had a lousy 10 days mixed with some bizarre (but basically boring) rollercoasting, and by tonight I couldn't stand another repeat of the same old shite.
Go home, boil a mealie, watch the 7pm news, call the girlfriend, blog about Hurricanes, 10pm news, Oprah, feel bad about missing another day's training, fall asleep on the coach at 1am with a newspaper for a blanket.
I didn't feel like a so-so bla de blah movie though. Not after The Dark Knight. And IMDB gives it just 7.2 out 10 (Knight got something like a 9, quite a downward jump). In the end, this is what got me into the theatre:
25-year-old Wes (James McAvoy) is the most disaffected, disconnected office cubicle-dwelling drone in the world. His boss chews him out hourly, his girlfriend ignores him routinely and his life plods along interminably. Everyone has convinced him that he'll never amount to anything and so he finds himself stuck in his slow, clock-punching rut.
Ja, it rang a bell. I think the other thing was I was confusing the main actor, James MacAvoy with that creepy cool wannabe kid in Transformers (the witless Shia LaBeouf). James Mac-a-Who? Well, you'll remember him after this, but he also played superbly in Atonement.
It's not for nothing that the likes of Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie are in this flick. You might think a flick about assasins is little boy entertainment, but this is based on the gruelling, gritty comic series, and, to tell the truth, a colleague (who deserves a six pack of beer come to think of it)slapped a plastic covered comic book on my desk one day - WANTED. It doesn't disappoint.
This flick felt like someone had come into my life in the middle of the night,and hacked a pound or two of my personal flesh and blood and thrown it onto the silver screen, blood, sweat, tears and all. Almost all of it resonated. The bitter humor, the fierce frustration, the anger, the violence. Bizarrely, in the middle of the movie Tolle's injunctions came through to me...that violence in movies awakens the painbodies we carry, and services our unresolved frustration. Well, it may be a bad thing, but it certainly felt good. Like vindication. Jeepers, I walked out of that flick like I walked out of Rocky as a 10 year old.
I give Wanted a solid 8 (for me personally, tonight, it felt like a 9, but that would be selfish and self-indulgent). There is something cultish about this flick, in the way Pulp Fiction was. I laughed out loud, I mopped blood off my face, I gasped, I gagged. I walked out exhilarated. I'm grateful that somewhere in that gratuitous violence is a story that makes sense (believe it or not), and some ass kicking dialogue. Like this:
Wesley: [narrating] This *is* me taking control; from Sloan, from the fraternity, from Janice, billing reports, ergonomic keyboards, from cheating girlfriends and sack of shit best friends. This is me taking back control of my life.
You and I don't need to take control with a gun. But we do need to take control.
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