I WANTED this movie to be nerdier, but was alright with it anyway

My official review of WANTED is up over at FFWD, though I had to shorten it by 300 words to get it into the space. Published here, for your viewing pleasure, is the unabridged review, which I like more, but what do I know?

Jump, and all will be revealed.

Mark Millar’s Wanted was a 2003-04 comic book series about Wesley Gibson, “one of the most insignificant assholes of the 21^st century” who discovers he has the supernatural ability to kill people. In a world where all the cape-clad superheroes have been exterminated by an unstoppable league of villains called The Fraternity, he can’t fly, he can’t shoot lasers from his eyes, he just “straight up stops motherfuckers from breathing,” with guns, knives, and whatever else happens to be laying around. A clever distillation of the comic book power fantasy, Millar’s analysis of the way we identify with pop culture icons argued that even the most average, simpering weakling would turn into a mass-murdering rapist if all consequences for his actions were removed—which is essentially what the discovery of superpowers does.

Timur Bekmambetov’s film version is an extremely liberal adaptation, to say the least. The explicit content has been toned way down in general, but the major changes are diegetic. The Fraternity of supervillains is replaced by a fraternity of assassins who all possess supernatural ‘bullet bending’ abilities that are given a psuedo-mystical rationalization involving weapons that look like something out of Leonado DaVinci’s sketches and an eldrich loom that tells them to kill people. It’s all rather like something J.J. Abrams would come up with in the throes of fever, and in a way, the change makes sense as a reflection of the change in medium. The heroes of golden age action cinema are Chow Yun Fat and Bruce Willis, not Superman and Batman, so it’s a justifiable—though probably not intentional—transposition. Though source material has certainly not been ignored, it’s been treated more as inspiration than gospel, and, frankly, the differences aren’t that important.

References, in-jokes and cribbed monologue abounds, but the film version of Wanted is closer to The Matrix than it is to the original comic book. The bombastic set piece action is equal parts outrageous, hilarious and thrilling, and it trades the Wachowski’s loose understanding of Descarte and Plato with an even looser understanding of John Stewart Mill and Pierre-Simon Laplace. This does, as the Internet hivemind feared, drain the story of any kind of poignancy or relevance—but let’s face it, Millar’s original script wasn’t much more than explosive action sequences strung together by an abject pretense toward Grant Morrison’s mountaintop drug-guru philosophies. In fact, like many good adaptations, the significant derivations from the source material free the film from answering to the original themes and messages in every way, making it an entirely different beast altogether.

Though Bekmambetov’s grasp of Leplace’s Demon might be flimsy, his hold on The Law of Exploding Rats is absolute. The law states, basically, that they are awesome, and when hundreds are used as the first steps in a fifteen minute gun-ballet through a textile mill, they are totally awesome. In addition to this crucial philosophy, Bekmambetov also has a solid comprehension of the Hitting Guys With Ergonomic Keyboards In Slow Motion Paradox, the Shooting People While Your Gun Is Already Inside Someone’s Head Problem and the classic epistemological argument that Shooting Bullets Out Of The Air With Other Bullets Is Way Cool. It may be a distant cousin of Millar’s original story, but the vital element has been maintained: The giddy, adolescent, completely unironic lunacy.

Wanted is not without its problems, but they’re shared, for the most part, with every other lovably dim-witted action-blockbuster. There’s at least one obvious, mile-wide plot hole, character motivations are paper thin and the exposition is handled with cruel, uncreative efficiency. One flaw it borrows from Millar’s comic is the ending, which was a strong contender for laziest writing ever done by a mammal. It’s been significantly altered in the film, but the message is essentially the same, and not an iota more intelligent. But Wanted is not trying to be an intelligent film. It’s not even trying to be a moderately clever film. It’s trying to be a film with exploding rats in it, and in that, it succeeds marvelously.