Wanted is far too hip for its own good. The only reason the shooter gets away with material this preposterous is because it hardly puts any effort into its hipness.
Shoot’em Up, the last movie that tried to make gun violence sexy and cool, put in too much effort; we rejected it because it felt forced. It was the kid who tried to please everyone and thus pleases no one.
Wanted consists of a great deal of style, but with an underlying hint of substance. This isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it invokes deeper thought in a curious final move by a character played by Angelina Jolie, but more on that later.
The film picks up with Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) as he narrates his own story from within an office cubicle at an accounting firm. “It’s my anorexic boss’ birthday,” he says in the first line of the movie. We see the boss and she’s not anorexic — she’s tipping the scales and plowing cake down her gullet. The film is filtered through Wesley’s glib attitude like muddy water through cheese cloth, his words hateful of himself and of his pathetic existence. The boss comes over and waves a stapler in the air, maniacally stapling pages to punctuate her executive threats. It sends Wesley into an anxiety attack. This is his life — wretched and meaningless.
What he needs is a revelation, a liberation. It comes at the pharmacy, where he’s marked for extermination by the world’s greatest assassin, a man named Cross. We’ve seen Cross earlier in the film as he made an impossibly accurate sniper shot that travels — over the course of about five miles — through train cars, office windows and into the back of a man’s head sending brain matter and skull into our laps. The bullet that makes this world-record trajectory is machine-cut with spirals, and breaks apart in stages like an Apollo rocket. So Cross is good at what he does, and the only reason Wesley is alive is thanks to Fox (Angelina Jolie), a competing assassin who whisks him away in a blizzard of copper-jacketed lead.
Jolie, whose sexiness the movie feeds from, doesn’t kill many people, but I’ve always wondered how she justifies roles like this one to the United Nations, where she frequently works to promote humanitarian needs. “She’s an ethical assassin,” she might say. She’d be right: Fox does not kill indiscriminately. She’s part of a group called The Fraternity, a 1,000-year-old organization of weavers who analyze cotton fibers for ways to right the universe. This part gets a little sketchy so hold on: life requires balance and a woven piece of cloth can secretly reveal the names of bad people, those who have or will disrupt the cosmos with their actions. The Fraternity’s job is to then eliminate these irregularities from the fabric of the universe. It's like Charlie's Angels if Charlie was a pillowcase.
The fact that it does this with a certain of amount of PCP-induced zeal is one reason that Wanted works so well. It’s action on overdrive, with no regards to basic physics or Isaac Newton. Things explode recklessly, are shot randomly, and cars are required to do stunts almost too farfetched even for a movie this silly. In one scene a hitman can’t kill a man in a limo due to a layer of bullet-proof glass. The solution: flip a car over the limo so the assassin, mid-flip, can shoot the guy through the open sunroof. In another scene, Wesley is scooped up into the passenger seat of a car in just such a way that it took me four viewings to figure it out completely.
Wanted’s big claim to fame is the way it suggests that a bullet’s trajectory can be controlled to a certain extent. “Curve the bullet,” Fox tells Wesley, who’s never even shot a straight one before. With some practice — a flick of the wrist, a spin on the gun barrel, and mostly dumb luck — he’s curving bullets around corners, hanging chunks of beef and a very brave Fox, whose hair brushes aside as the bullet cuts its curved path around her. Nevermind the fact that they can't see behind corners, but whatever.
The bullet-curving business reminds me of what a golfer once told me: “You know what would happen if I could control my slice?” I didn’t know. “Nothing,” he joked. The golfer would be intrigued to see what curving bullets can do: eliminate bad guys hiding behind columns, shoot other bullets in mid-air and ventilate chests on curved pavilions. One scene begins with about a dozen bad guys spread out against the walls of a round room. It doesn’t require too much invention to imagine the outcome. After The Matrix, in which humans dodged bullets, Wanted is the next logical step in the bullet evolution of Hollywood. What’s next, GPS smart bullets? Bullets with MP3 players? Bullets that no longer require guns to be fired?
Wanted is not all exhausting gunplay, but most of it is. And even though Jolie’s in it — she makes a poetic final decision that shows her extreme commitment to the Fraternity — a lot of the story falls onto McAvoy (Atonement), who must go from nerdy accountant to bullet-curving assassin in about two weeks. He must also brave various metaphysical speeches from Sloan, the wise leader of the Fraternity, a role only Morgan Freeman can give distinction. But who funds the Fraternity? Does the Universe have a checking account to pay these badasses? And if the loom goes haywire, are random people marked for death in the fabric? And who decided that binary was the loom's language? If you think about any part of Wanted for too long your brain will rattle to a stop, but it still works as a high-octane, super-stylish summer movie.
When Rambo came out earlier this year, it was called gun porn. Wanted is the next best thing — bullet porn.
***This review originally ran in the July 1, 2008 issue of the West Valley View.***
Few words work when it comes to describing the kinetic joy and wonder that is WALL•E. Few words are appropriate because WALL•E himself only knows about three — all names.
One of them is his own. “Wuuuh-allll-leeeee,” he bleeps with the goofy syntax of a talking ATM machine. His name is how he introduces himself. Added to his greetings are friendly little waves that don’t quite compute with the other robots, but the infectious act of waving overcomes them anyway. One robot, whose sole purpose is to type computer code at about 4 words per minute, seems absolutely baffled with WALL•E’s robot kindness: he pumps the hydraulic cylinders in his digits, gives his joints a twist, and voila, there he is waving back in all its innocent splendor.
WALL•E, of course, is not a human, but a little robot in this computer-animated film. He has tank treads for feet, a little oven-like torso that opens and closes, and a head made of the most inquisitive pair of binoculars. I mentioned that WALL•E speaks with a limited vocabulary, but don't get the impression there's dialogue — vast stretches of the movie are almost silent. We don’t hear a human voice for a very long time and when we do, we kind of miss the robots and their more expressive dialect of bleeps and bloops. WALL•E is voiced — voiced mechanically and digitally, that is— by Ben Burtt, the sound designer who gave us the classic Star Wars sounds: Darth Vader’s breathing, that famous lightsaber noise and the entire language of R2-D2, who could easily be a close cousin to WALL•E.
This is not a feel-good movie at all. It’s a feel-great movie. It’s a movie so delightfully simple that it could be baby stuff, a notch or two above Teletubbies perhaps, but that’s part of its glorious charm — its simplicity is soothing and refreshing. In many ways it feels like a Charlie Chaplin film in its straightforward minimalism: entire sequences hinge on facial reactions, body language, movements of the eyes. This is Chaplin’s Little Tramp as a Xerox machine, a binary load lifter, a Roomba vacuum cleaner.
The story goes like this: mankind polluted Earth so badly that everyone decided to flee in big resort-style spaceships. Before blastoff, they left thousands of clean-up droids to clean the planet in man’s absence. After 700 years, only one of the robots, WALL•E, is still operable. Every day WALL•E shovels junk into his torso, grumbles mechanically for a bit and then spits out a compacted cube of trash. These cubes are stacked into the stratosphere, in parks where there was once trees and in the oceans where there was once water.
We’re led to believe that WALL•E has some sort of glitch, which is what makes him so cheerful. Johnny 5 (Short Circuit) had the same problem, but he was never this cute or likeable. WALL•E has a friend, a little cockroach that might be a robot bug or a real roach; I could never tell. His home is filled with interesting bits of junk he finds in earth’s clutter: lawn gnomes, lighters, light bulbs, a lacy bra and one VHS tape, Hello, Dolly!, which he watches over and over again as its songs fill his little circuit boards first with happiness and later loneliness.
WALL•E functions cleverly as a robot. His movements are very mechanical, but also very fluid. A great amount of time was spent by animators to give him robot movements as opposed to human ones. When scared he compacts into a cube, when sad his binocular eyes droop, when he sees an attractive female robot his metal body goes limp and his eyes perk up — WALL•E’s movements sell this movie.
The plot eventually turns into a romance and goes into space after WALL•E meets Eve, a futuristic probe droid sent to Earth to collect what may be it’s only biological organism, a plant that WALL•E is growing out of an old boot. Eve, designed after an iPod no doubt, has captivated WALL•E’s attention so completely that those Hello, Dolly! love songs now have meaning to him. He tries many times, with little success, to hold her hand and at one point it builds up to the ultimate sign of his affection if only he could get the nerve to do it — apparently even robots get girl shy.
I’ve written about the simplicity of this film, but that’s just one level. WALL•E does have an undercurrent of complexity running through it. Besides being a wonderful example of non-verbal communication skills and a rather heartbreaking romance, it can also be biting satire. When the film rockets into space we finally meet humans, who, after years of video games and holographic chambers, have become so obese they can no longer walk, or even get shoes on their pudgy feet. These gelatinous mounds chug soda, ride around in hovering wheelchairs and are bombarded by advertising so loud and obnoxious you’ll understand how Earth was wasted. This is heavy stuff, considering the movie is so light and effervescent. But if Al Gore's right, WALL•E's Earth could very likely be our Earth in about 100 years. It also touches on our consumption as a people — as Americans more specifically — and how affluenza might be our ultimate downfall. The fact that it's brave enough to embrace all this in its cutely animated arms adds another dimension to its charm.
On the ship with the blobby humans, we meet many other robots, including Mo, a cleaning robot that is perplexed at all the dirty tread tracks that are suddenly criss-crossing the ship. After WALL•E’s is captured and sent in for repairs — no one noticed he was the model from 700 years ago — we meet a motley crew of broken robots, each of which has more character than the normal-functioning ones. This leads to chases inside and outside the ship, a fight with the ship’s autopilot and various little one-off scenes with WALL•E and Eve as they grow on each other. There’s a hilarious sequence with the ship’s captain as he takes his first steps as the soundtrack cues Richard Strauss and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh and bring tissues: I’m predicting WALL•E will be a tearjerker for some. A good measuring stick can be applied here: If you cried in Iron Giant, you'll cry in this.
I’ve neglected to tell you what company made this film, but it won’t be any surprise — Pixar Animation Studio. This is one of Pixar’s best, but isn’t every one? (Cars might be the exception.) WALL•E is animated beautifully: the space scenes are clean and crisp, the Earth scenes muddled and hazy, and the robots are wonderful and inventive. Surely this is as good as The Incredibles, Finding Nemo or Toy Story, maybe better considering it does more with basically no voice actors.
It’s geared for younger children, but adults should surrender their age at the door and come out as amazed as the little viewers will. WALL•E is, so far, the best film of the year, a delicately crafted fantastically original human drama that stars no humans at all.
***This review originally ran in the West Valley View June 27, 2008.***
And just because I love the photos, here's more:
It pains me to write that the best line from The Love Guru comes from the gag reel in the closing credits. And from a minor character, too.
Poor Verne Troyer, the little actor who gave us Mini Me, he’s standing there waiting to give his lines while the movie’s cinematographer, wrangling with a camera, is trying to fit regular-sized people in a frame with all 32 inches of Troyer. “All I see are butts,” the camera guy says off-screen. Mini Me, without missing a beat: “Now you know how it feels.”
I debated not giving away that line, but I didn’t want to send curious moviegoers — the ones who weren’t shoved away by the shitacular movie trailer — into Love Guru to brave 90 torturous fart-trumpeting, elephant-humping, testicle-crushing minutes to witness one honest line inside the worst movie of the year. And that’s not hyperbole talking — Love Guru is so profoundly toxic we should study it the way scientists study anthrax or tuberculosis or flesh-eating viruses.
Here is a wasteland of horrible ideas. You could detonate nukes on this plot and its complexion would improve tenfold. See, there’s Guru Pitka and he can solve the mysteries of the universe using a Gary Busey-approved collection of bizarre acronyms (“BIBLE: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”). He can also convince circus elephants to mate on hockey rinks during the Stanley Cup finals, but that’s neither here nor there.
Pitka is hired by a hockey team to bring eternal peace to its star player, whose wife has left him amid a scandal in People magazine, a publication that did not know what ice hockey was until Elisha Cuthbert started ensnaring players in her warm, pillowy bosom. Anyway, the hockey player is black, the team owner is female, and the head coach is a little person — rarities in the NHL. Instead of humorously commenting on these issues, Guru has an elephant take a dump on camera; the clumps of dung are as big as soccer balls.
Oh, and that’s not all: there’s a cockfight with Pitka, who declares victory by biting the bird’s head clean off (a homoerotic metaphor for the movie perhaps?). At one point two men fight with mops soaked in buttery-colored urine — one of the men has an Acadamy Award at home he should be impaled on. At another, Pitka mimics a diarrhea noise with his mouth in a beer stein to teach one of his wacky principles, maybe the lesson of TROTS: Time’s Running Out on This Shit. There is so much scatological and ball-swinging humor you’d swear you just time warped to third-grade recess. Needless to say, this comedy is aimed at anti-social teen males who have not been potty-trained.
Strangely enough, it could also be a sequel to Freddy Got Fingered, which featured elephant ejaculation, post-labor baby lassoing, sexual assault on the handicapped and other Tom Green hobbies. To be fair, though, I always thought Freddy Got Fingered was a satire on the gross-out comedy. Love Guru is not smart enough to contemplate the meaning (or even spelling) of satire.
Austin Powers creator Mike Myers plays Guru Pitka. It’s a performance that’s so old and tired it could be carbon-dated to the Paleolithic era. And it doesn’t take much squinting to see Austin Powers in a beard — even the accents are similar. Myers tries way too hard selling his particular brand of humorless humor. He’s loud and obnoxious, clawing for attention as he zips around Love Guru on a motorized pillow; or as he frets a sitar through Steve Miller songs and namedrops “99 Problems”; or as he wears a beard of cotton candy because, well, why the hell not? This is a desperate and sad performance for Myers, who, come to think of it, has always been this pathetic with one exception (Wayne’s World, a guilty pleasure I confess).
If Myers hasn’t crossed India off his travel itinerary he might want to sharpen a pencil. Richard Gere kissed a girl on the cheek and the entire country came unglued and nearly lynched him and his gerbil. Myers twenty-ups that by taking sophomoric jabs at Indian food, the culture and language, Indian names and even Gandhi — using Gandhi himself (shame on you Ben Kingsley). At several points he fires salvos toward Hinduism itself. Some will call it racist, although I’m going to stop just shy of that by calling it stupid. Oh yeah, and I haven't mentioned yet: Jessica Alba is in this, proving that she takes everything her agent, who is apparently a fence post, gets excreted across his desk. Maybe now that she's a mother she'll torture her spawn with her presence instead of us, the movie-going public.
Watching The Love Guru is like watching the same three shirts dry through the window of a clothes dryer — red, blue, green … red, blue, green … red, blue, green. Occasionally, they’ll fall out of order, or reverse order entirely, but you can count on those same three colors. Guru’s red, blue and green are:
• Dirty names — Every name in the movie is amateur-hour material: Richard “Dick” Pants, Jacques “Le Coq” Grande, Guru Tugginmypudha, Guru Satchabigknob, Coach Cherkov. Surprisingly, Myers avoids “Your Mama” jokes only because his humor predates them by decades.
• Penis jokes — Male anatomy is drawn, baked, deep-fried, mashed, kicked, punched and otherwise totally abused. Males who fascinate this much on the male anatomy have a name, and now in California they can get married. Hear it here first: this guru is gay.
• Mariska Hargitay — She’s Jayne Mansfield’s daughter and the famous Law & Order: SVU star. She’s featured here because her full name sounds like an Indian greeting: “Mariska Hargitay, guru.” “A very happy Mariska Hargitay to you, too.” It’s no surprise when Hargitay shows up, but sadly the joke just keeps going and going and going.
These three gags are recycled so frequently that you can predict entire sequences of this zingy movie, although the gag with Pitka miming a wolverine for 10 minutes caught me way off guard. As did the pachyderm coitus in the film’s finale, but no one would ever guess that … ever. And if someone you know does guess the elephant sex before it happens, get them a good shrink.
Love Guru is easily one of the worst movies of the last decade. It made me pity Mike Myers. Is he that bored with himself that he has to retreat inside these dopey characters? Even Eddie Murphy seems to have (temporarily) outgrown that stage. I question Myers’ friends too: could none of them have said, “Hey Mike, this is really stupid, and not in a good way”? Chances are all his friends grew up, got jobs, had families and at some point stopped snickering at the penises drawn on the bathroom walls. Why Myers hasn't stopped is the troubling part.
***Large portions of this review originally ran in the West Valley View June 20, 2008.***
My patience and tolerance for M. Night Shyamalan’s endless tinkering with his career has finally come to a fizzled, tattered end with a movie that isn’t even half bad. The problem is it’s not half good either. And this guy was supposed to be the next Spielberg, the next Hitchcock.
Admittedly, we leapt on Sixth Sense a bit too hard and we expected too many great things too soon from a young director still trying to align his bearings in the film community he had so impressively wowed. But that leaves no excuse for his heavy-handed, self-important recent films. Pictures like Lady in the Water, which was made with no one but his children in mind, or The Village, which I admired but will admit it smacked of a pompous director gloating at how clever he was.
Extending the auteur theory on the same two-dimensional plane as his previous works, The Happening is very much a Shyamalan film because it deals with far-out scenarios as they happen to real people. His pictures attempt some kind of hyper-real aesthetic: the stories involve aliens, monsters, superheroes and ghosts, but the characters are shown doing things we would probably do in similar situations. Their actions are so authentic that we identify with their simplicity.
In a calm afternoon in Central Park, a woman hears a scream. “That’s odd,” she says as people begin walking in reverse and repeating themselves in confused tones. Then, one by one, everyone begins killing themselves: construction workers leap from buildings, a woman stabs at her jugular with her hair pin and drivers ram carelessly into trees. In one chilling sequence, a cop turns his pistol on himself. After the gun falls from his dead hand a pedestrian picks it up and repeats the suicide. This goes on with other onlookers until the gun clicks empty and the last person, in a catatonic daze, must now finish their suicide by another gruesome means.
So now you know why the film was Rated R, Shyamalan's first such rating. When the construction workers leap from buildings their bodies hit the ground in mists of pink, compound fractures and gaping. Some land on hard edges, or in contorted positions that allow bodies to fold and break in gruesome ways. Later we see a man turn on a riding mower and then lay down in front of it; the mower chugs over the man's torso until it begins spitting out his flesh, a mighty fine mulch I'd imagine. The R rating provides some interesting visuals to the film, but otherwise it's just a barrier keeping teens away from a movie they might find intriguing. For once, I'll argue that a PG-13 rating was the way to go.
Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is a school teacher outside the city. As he puts the finishing touches on a class discussion about where the honeybees have all gone — the answer to the film possibly? — school is let out early due to a terrorist act in Central Park. Of course, we’ve seen Central Park and we know terrorists were not involved. Soon people are packing onto trains to flee “the happening,” but what are they fleeing?
The movie has a terrific sequence that doesn’t attempt to answer the question, but does convey the paranoid terror of not knowing: on a train, as people learn new details (“It’s in Boston too!”) the twitchy paranoia escalates as claustrophobia descends onto those cramped, overcrowded train cars. Eventually the train stops because the conductor can’t get an answer from the next station, or even the next city. Ratcheting up the horror, one woman receives a call from her niece, who almost immediately begins repeating, "Calculus, calculus … calculus." The call ends with a table saw being turned on and then the sound of a wet, bone-splintering thud that we presume is …well, that’s for you to presume.
The film plays with what the happening might be: terrorism is dismissed, chemical warfare seems plausible and then some kind of earth defense mechanism is proposed. Like Shyamalan’s Signs, if you listen carefully the movie answers its own questions, but it throws out a number of red herrings first. For instance, we’re shown a man who owns a nursery. As he packs for the journey ahead he talks to his plants because research has shown, he says, that talking to plants stimulates their growth. As he leaves the greenhouse, we can see the nursery is within a mile of the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. Later nuclear radiation is proposed as the main culprit to the suicides. Are these clues, connections, coincidences? The movie has an answer, but it lets us agonize on our own with the truth.
The Happening is very much a human drama; it’s not so much about the suicide virus but about how people react to it as they are overcome by it. Elliot is on the road with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel, proving that any movie benefits from her presence) and his niece (Ashlyn Sanchez). He instinctively gets off the main roads and into the country, where the trees howl and the wind screams through the tall grass. Then he decides it’s the plants that are turning off the part of our brains that keeps us from harming ourselves. (I would hope there's more than one switch in our brain that keeps us from jabbing dinner forks into our eyes.) Earth is defending itself from us, he figures — a robust global warming allegory perhaps? — and they’re in the middle of exquisite farming country, where the next breeze from an unharvested field could rewire their brains to make them gouge their wrists out or hang themselves from trees.
I enjoyed the suspense and build-up of The Happening, and in many ways I enjoyed Shyamalan’s shameless writing and directing style, which toy with our emotions more than they should be allowed to get away with. I did not enjoy how the film ended, mainly because it didn’t — not only was his trademark twist gone, but so was everything else. A better movie would have not skipped ahead three months to simply reveal Alma’s pregnancy, which is pointless to everyone except Elliot and Alma.
One of the last developments before the time jump is a scene with an older woman at the edge of civilization, who hasn’t heard of the happening because she has no phone or television. Her performance — I’m still trying to figure out if her craziness was intentional or not — was so uneven and messy that it derailed the picture. That did it, but so did Shyamalan, who expects us to buy into his asinine conclusion after the long journey we weathered to get to it. And with no twist ending, I left the theater with nothing to debate about with the other viewers; it was all wrapped up too neat.
The Happening will confuse and bother many moviegoers, but Shyamalan’s shrinking legion of fans will be captivated to a certain degree. If I could give him some advice, though, it would be this: let someone else write your next movie. He’s always been a better director than a writer.
***This review originally ran in the West Valley View June 17, 2008.***
Remember those old Nintendo cartridges that would stop working after about a month's worth of binge playing? First you’d blow like the Big Bad Wolf on the exposed chip, then slam it up and down in the console, then maddeningly mash on the reset button … all to get Super Mario booted. When it got that bad, the games never played right again.
The Incredible Hulk is attempting a similar reboot. A new director was called in to blow on the chip, a fresh Hulk was hired to shake the machine around, and that reset button has been hit and hit and hit again. And, for the most part, this Hulk may have been successfully rebooted. But what’s it been rebooted to?
Not Ang Lee’s stylish, if also misguided, Hulk from 2003. No, that’s why the reboot was requested — in fact, demanded — by fans who went ballistic when Lee tried to make Hulk poetic, a haiku of heaviness, instead of a mean, green punching machine.
The big guy’s been reset into a frustratingly average movie, void of any personality and style. Its star may be impervious to pretty much everything, but the film takes no risks with him or its bland narrative. No doubt, The Incredible Hulk should have been the first film made, but in contrast with Hulk, it’s boring. Lee’s version was a dud, but he was onto something with the comic-style framing, the introspective themes and that unique narrative structure. The best version of the Hulk character, undoubtedly, is in an unexplored peak between the two films.
Until we get that one, though, we have The Incredible Hulk, a fresh look at Bruce Banner and his green alter ego. Banner, now played (and partly written) by Edward Norton, is a scientist on the run in Brazil. We’re given his backstory in the opening credits: Banner tests gamma radiation on himself in a military experiment; it produces his original Hulk reaction, tearing clothes and all. The experiment doesn’t go well, which is why he’s on the run from the crackpot general who thinks he owns the patent on giant, pothole-stomping men with anger management issues.
Norton, a talented actor capable of an explosive mixture of emotions, plays the role too safe, and way too rigid. His Banner is on cruise control, very much like the rest of the movie. Overacting would have served him well, but instead he’s in a coma. He’s granted one brief reprieve: Buying clothes in Mexico, he asks for a certain kind of pants … “Mas stretchy,” he says.
Norton’s no Robert Downey Jr., who gave the finger to all other comic book heroes earlier this summer as Tony Stark in Iron Man. At the end of Hulk, Downey, as Stark, makes a cameo (in the greater comic mythology, Iron Man and Hulk are in the Avengers together) and we see in startling clarity how dull Banner, or maybe just Norton, can be when compared to more interesting characters such as Stark. Maybe the cameo worked too well, though: I wished I would had seen Iron Man again and avoided Incredible Hulk altogether.
Banner may be a wimp, but his Hulk 2.0 is definitely the real deal. He’s meaner and tougher, and director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter 2) gives him more to do than anguishing over his dilemma in front of a cracked mirror. This Hulk actually stops running occasionally to show off and fight — be it with gunships, sonic pulse rays or the villain Abomination (Tim Roth), a reptilian monster created using one of Hulkie’s blood samples. The movie is a straight-up action movie, which is what these comic flicks are supposed to be. It won't be disappoint people who are looking for mass destruction. Let the smoke clear and the debris settle and the experience is hollow, void of any real enthusiasm or excitement for the genre.
Not all of it is mindless punching: Hulk’s “green time” gets inventive, like when he mashes a cop car into metal boxing gloves or when he uses a clap loud enough to wake the dead (and kill the living) to put out a fire. And for the first time in the series, we start to see Hulk as a superhero capable of heroic public service and not just a botched lab experiment on the loose.
A romance with Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) figures in as well, but it doesn’t go anywhere because, let’s face it, lovemaking with the Hulk could end disastrously; the movie stops short of having Hulk endorse Magnum condoms. Tyler — who’s not half as interesting as Betty Ross’ previous actress, Jennifer Connelly — gives gooey glances at Norton, but their chemistry is weak at best. Betty has a rather strained relationship with her father, Gen. Ross (William Hurt), the military man who methodically hunts Banner across the planet. He spends much of the movie in military installations explaining things, which is déjà vu if you’ve seen even one other comic book movie.
The action is intense, the Hulk looks more convincing, and the greater mythology of Hulk and his relationship with other Marvel Comics characters is an interesting addition, but The Incredible Hulk seems content with being tasteless — it’s just another comic book movie with another super character doing another round of super things.
By trying to tone down the risky Hulk, this Incredible Hulk went too far in the other direction, into complete boredom.
***This review originally ran in the West Valley View June 13, 2008.***
Wanted is far too hip for its own good. The only reason the shooter gets away with material this preposterous is because it hardly puts any effort into its hipness. 
What he needs is a revelation, a liberation. It comes at the pharmacy, where he’s marked for extermination by the world’s greatest assassin, a man named Cross. We’ve seen Cross earlier in the film as he made an impossibly accurate sniper shot that travels — over the course of about five miles — through train cars, office windows and into the back of a man’s head sending brain matter and skull into our laps. The bullet that makes this world-record trajectory is machine-cut with spirals, and breaks apart in stages like an Apollo rocket. So Cross is good at what he does, and the only reason Wesley is alive is thanks to Fox (Angelina Jolie), a competing assassin who whisks him away in a blizzard of copper-jacketed lead. 
Jolie, whose sexiness the movie feeds from, doesn’t kill many people, but I’ve always wondered how she justifies roles like this one to the United Nations, where she frequently works to promote humanitarian needs. “She’s an ethical assassin,” she might say. She’d be right: Fox does not kill indiscriminately. She’s part of a group called The Fraternity, a 1,000-year-old organization of weavers who analyze cotton fibers for ways to right the universe. This part gets a little sketchy so hold on: life requires balance and a woven piece of cloth can secretly reveal the names of bad people, those who have or will disrupt the cosmos with their actions. The Fraternity’s job is to then eliminate these irregularities from the fabric of the universe. It's like Charlie's Angels if Charlie was a pillowcase.
The fact that it does this with a certain of amount of PCP-induced zeal is one reason that Wanted works so well. It’s action on overdrive, with no regards to basic physics or Isaac Newton. Things explode recklessly, are shot randomly, and cars are required to do stunts almost too farfetched even for a movie this silly. In one scene a hitman can’t kill a man in a limo due to a layer of bullet-proof glass. The solution: flip a car over the limo so the assassin, mid-flip, can shoot the guy through the open sunroof. In another scene, Wesley is scooped up into the passenger seat of a car in just such a way that it took me four viewings to figure it out completely. 
Wanted’s big claim to fame is the way it suggests that a bullet’s trajectory can be controlled to a certain extent. “Curve the bullet,” Fox tells Wesley, who’s never even shot a straight one before. With some practice — a flick of the wrist, a spin on the gun barrel, and mostly dumb luck — he’s curving bullets around corners, hanging chunks of beef and a very brave Fox, whose hair brushes aside as the bullet cuts its curved path around her. Nevermind the fact that they can't see behind corners, but whatever. 
The bullet-curving business reminds me of what a golfer once told me: “You know what would happen if I could control my slice?” I didn’t know. “Nothing,” he joked. The golfer would be intrigued to see what curving bullets can do: eliminate bad guys hiding behind columns, shoot other bullets in mid-air and ventilate chests on curved pavilions. One scene begins with about a dozen bad guys spread out against the walls of a round room. It doesn’t require too much invention to imagine the outcome. After The Matrix, in which humans dodged bullets, Wanted is the next logical step in the bullet evolution of Hollywood. What’s next, GPS smart bullets? Bullets with MP3 players? Bullets that no longer require guns to be fired? 
Wanted is not all exhausting gunplay, but most of it is. And even though Jolie’s in it — she makes a poetic final decision that shows her extreme commitment to the Fraternity — a lot of the story falls onto McAvoy (Atonement), who must go from nerdy accountant to bullet-curving assassin in about two weeks. He must also brave various metaphysical speeches from Sloan, the wise leader of the Fraternity, a role only Morgan Freeman can give distinction. But who funds the Fraternity? Does the Universe have a checking account to pay these badasses? And if the loom goes haywire, are random people marked for death in the fabric? And who decided that binary was the loom's language? If you think about any part of Wanted for too long your brain will rattle to a stop, but it still works as a high-octane, super-stylish summer movie. 
***This review originally ran in the July 1, 2008 issue of the West Valley View.***
