My Night at the Movies Part II
By Kimberley Jones, 12:05PM, Wed. Jul. 2, 2008
Our boards have been busy lately with disgruntlement over Josh Rosenblatt's recent pan of Wanted – he called the comic-book adaptation from Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov "so salacious and voyeuristic as to be almost pornographic."
Sounds intriguing, no? So I checked it out last night, in part as "research" for next week's online debate, Film Fight, in which Josh and I will spar over comic book movies (see tomorrow's issue for more details). But, really, I'm as much a sucker for pop entertainment as the next guy, and I figured you really couldn't go wrong with three leads like Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, and (sweet delicious) James McAvoy. I mean, if nothing else, at least there'd be some hot, sweaty assassin sex to savor, right?
Oh, I stand corrected.
How did it suck? Let me count the ways (spoilers after the break):
The clunking one-liners...
The excruciatingly long exposition...
The indiscriminate carnage...
The inexplicable hostility toward the paying public... (See Glenn Kenny's dead-on reflections here.)
The guffaw-ful sight of James McAvoy squaring his jaw and running in slo-mo for what felt like minutes on end...
The reducing of Angelina Jolie to a lazy curled lip here, yawning cocked eyebrow there (not to mention skin-and-bones)...
The staggering stupidity of Morgan Freeman booming (straight-faced!) about "The Loom of Fate"...
The fact that we are meant to cheer the wholesale slaughter of foot soldiers who, two blinks ago, were on the same side as our hero and whose only failing was to not have the same information as said hero about their duplicitous general...
And did I mention the missed opportunity for hot, sweaty assassin sex?
Suddenly Idiocracy's prediction of a mindless, grunting future for entertainment seems so near.
A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.
July 16, 2024
