![]() Bekmambetov’s energy or enthusiasm: he blows people and stuff up with gusto. The problem is that after a grindingly repetitive rotation of bang-bang, boom-boom, knuckle sandwiches and exploding heads, I wanted to sink into one of those tubs myself (minus the rats scuttling nearby). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage in a layout in Vogue. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. What does turn up looks familiar the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Mr. ![]() This is, after all, a movie almost entirely organized around the sights and sounds of men piercing one another’s bodies, which makes for a whole lot of twitching and spurting.Īngelina Jolie in Wanted. Credit. Bekmambetov, a Russian filmmaker who has earned a cult following with his razzly-dazzly thrillers “Day Watch” and “Night Watch,” certainly proves here that he knows how to use every blunt tool of the bullying trade: flashy effects, zippy cuts, simulated death, walls of sound, wheels of steel and, in between the bullets and blood, a hot mama to make the brother-to-brother, man-on-man action less worrisome. With her mean smiley-sneer and snug clothes, her heels and hieroglyphics, she cuts the kind of disciplinarian figure who can bring antsy boys of all ages to their knees or at least into their theater seats.īeating down the audience is what the crudest entertainments try to do, and in this respect, and in every other, “Wanted” is nothing new. Few American actresses, especially those with such pin-skinny arms, can make beating a guy to the ground look so easy and, yeah, man, like fun. Jolie has been perfectly cast as a super-scary, seemingly amoral assassin named (wait for it) Fox. Jolie and a couple of ideas recycled from “The Matrix” and “Fight Club.” Mind you, Ms. Well, that’s one way to get the attention of fickle moviegoers, particularly if, like the director Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve got nothing else going for your big Hollywood debut except Ms. Suddenly the camera cuts to his face as a bullet exits his forehead in slow motion, his skin stretching forward as the projectile tears through it, going straight for the camera and our already numbed skulls. A man has soared onto the roof of a high-rise where he has laid a handful of others to waste. The money shot in “Wanted,” its pièce-de-special-effects-résistance and reason for green-lighted being, appears in the opening minutes of this noisy, ultraviolent shoot-’em-up with Angelina Jolie, her many tattoos and some guys.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |