Unwanted

Imagine being tied to a chair with your eyelids stapled open while someone flashes a strobe light in your face and blares death metal music in your ears for two hours.

That's how I felt watching Wanted.

It seems a lot of people quite liked this film, or at least didn't mind it - the two friends I watched it with both enjoyed it and it's apparently doing so well at the box office that Hollywood are knocking Mark Millar's door down for more (even though this ended up being one of the loosest comic book adaptations ever to hit the screen, moving completely away from its author's original Secret Society of Super-villains concept and porn-star Eminem hero). Yep, a lot of people want more Wanted.

Me, I hated it. But I'm not entirely alone. Two people who also found problems (though they didn't find it quite as despicable as I seemed to) were Dan and Tone. Dan commented, "every single character was a sociopath and so I had trouble feeling positive about any of them". Tone added "it's difficult to root for anyone in a movie this amoral, where even the lead delights in the slaughter, and also comes across as a bit of a tit... I did feel the need to wash my hands afterwards." I'd agree... but I'd also go much, much further. I didn't so much want to wash my hands as scrub out my mind. This was the most depressing and insidiously cynical movie I've seen since the Nazi propaganda of Starship Troopers or the Bible Belt sermonising of Forrest Gump. It was, in short, nihilism on film. If I thought this was an accurate representation of the human race, I'd have gunned down everyone in the cinema, myself included. Wash my hands? Bleach out my eyes!

Now, those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will realise that I have no problem with cynicism. I'm a natural born pessimist. I can happily do depressing too. Misanthropy? Bring it on! I love the films of Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute - two of the most misanthropic filmmakers you could ever hope to meet. Fight Club is in my All Time Top Five. And unlike Dan, who says he prefers his heroes to always wear white hats, I've no problem with anti-heroes. As long as they have some depth.

Depth is something Wanted sorely lacked. As is subtlety. As is humour. These three elements are essential if you're going to make a movie as bleak and violent and inhuman as this. Instead we got completely undeveloped, one-dimensional characters (the nerd revenge fantasy, the cold-hearted bitch who comes good, the Morgan Freeman), total sensory assault, and lad-mag gags ("he's the man!" or whatever McAvoy's cuckolding best mate kept saying - hard to hear above the cacophony). Of course, I shouldn't have expected anything else from a movie based on a Mark Millar comic - king of the Shock-and-Awe-minus-Common-Sense approach to storytelling, the man who once had Venom punch a hole through Spider-man's chest only to reveal moments later to his thoroughly cheated audience that, actually, that wasn't the real Spider-Man, it was just some guy who happened to be standing around on a rooftop in a Spider-Man costume and - in the middle of a fight - had been mistaken for the real thing by Venom, a character who would have been able to sense the impostor from a mile away. Subtlety? Depth? A sense of humour? Mark Millar knows not these things...