Wanted film review: A tapestry of violent action woven with visual ...

Tag : Woven Thread

Gibson (James McAvoy) lives a pathetic existence - he is bullied byhis boss while his girlfriend is having sex with his best friendacross the kitchen table.
Then he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie) as he queues in a store for hisanxiety pills and, before he knows it, he's embroiled in asupermarket shoot-out and asked to join a fraternity of assassins.He's told his father was a fraternity member who's just been killedand it's now his chance to avenge the murder and escape thedrudgery of his daily routine.
Gibson undergoes some violent training from Fox and her boss Sloan(Morgan Freeman) in order to harness his dormant skills ofsuperhuman reflexes and he learns that victims are chosen by amysterious loom which weaves the names of the assassins' targetsinto cloth in binary code.
After taking out his first target, Gibson pursues his father'salleged killer, Cross, played by the ruggedly handsome ThomasKretschmann (pictured at top, who was the ship's captain inJackson's King Kong remake, was also in Blade 2 and Resident Evil:Apocalypse and plays the disembodied spirit Johann Krauss in thissummer's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army). The chase culminated in astaggering action set-piece set aboard a chasm-crossing train wherethe visual FX were mindblowing.
But, as we race towards the climax, Gibson learns from rogue agentPekwarsksy (Terrence Stamp) that all is not what it seems and thatnot everyone can accept the mysterious loom's predestined deathorders.
The idea of a loom decreeing death was an interesting new additionby the director - it's not part of the original comicbooks - but itleft questions about who operated the loom and what force was atwork in weaving victims' names into pieces of cloth. Theexplanation on screen at the very beginning of the film about asociety of weavers forming a fraternity 1,000 years ago wasunnecessary as it was also mentioned in the movie and did nothingto further the mythology of the loom. Was this the same loom as theone fashioned by those weavers, now running by itself? How didpredestination work prior to 1,000 years ago?
The idea of one's destiny as something woven is not new, of course;the Moirae (or Fates) of Greek mythology controlled the thread oflife in every mortal: Clotho spun the thread on to a spindle,Lechesis measured it and Atropos chose the way a person would dieand then severed their thread with shears. In Germanic myth, theNorns spun the thread of fate at the foot of the tree of life.Ancient goddesses may have been too much for this modern actionmovie but some further explanation was needed.
The director weaves mainly a tapestry of visual bombardment in this1hr 48mins, R-rated, action-fest, which is a thrill ride ofcreative cinematography from beginning to end. But I did feel theheart and soul of Gibson's journey from office drone toadrenaline-fuelled assassin sometimes became a little overpoweredby the director's astonishing camera-craft and gravity-defyingaction scenes.