Wanted: Changes unwarranted

The would-have-been blockbuster, Wanted, starring  James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, and Angelina Jolie, came and went without too much of a to-do , at least amongst our bloggers and movie buffs locally, and I can’t really say I’m too surprised.  While it was a decent action flick, it did borrow heavily from movies like the Matrix, the oft-forgotten gem, Equilibrium, and even Fight Club to an extent.  But I’m not here for a movie review. I’m also not here to tell you something we all hear all the time – that the book, written by Mark Millar, and illustrated by JG Jones, is better than the movie (well, maybe I am)—but rather, that the book is something altogether different than the movie, and in trying to make the story more commercially viable, the movie-makers abandoned most of the concepts that made this story groundbreaking and worth seeing on the big screen in the first place.

While there are a few elements that remain the same -- the main character is a loser named Wesley Gibson, a secret organization known as the Fraternity exists, an attractive female supporting character called the Fox is around, and there’s an estranged father/son story dynamic unfolding – the rest of the movie’s plot is the nutty, dark-chocolate ass-child of a few Hollywood writers with a mystical love for textile mills, and creating moving pictures of Angeline Jolie with big guns on her person. For those of you that do not read graphic novels, or “funny books”, I wish to make clear what in the movie is made up and not part of the original story, and the cooler concepts the movie completely left out of the story.

The Fraternity are the bad guys

Sorry if this is a spoiler for some of you waiting for the DVD, but the movie begins with the premise that "the Fraternity" is a secret guild of hero assassins keeping the world safe, guided by the “Loom of Fate” (which I’ll get to in a minute) all noble, honorable, and upstanding. Bullshit. 
 

The Fraternity operates under no such pretense, and they are not assassins. They are straight up super-villains, super-villains who killed off the world’s super-heroes in an all-out war in the year 1986, then divided up the world into five pieces, to five families.  They operate in secret, but control everything.  They can do whatever they want, whenever they want just by flashing their “fraternity” pins.  And they don’t take orders from a “Loom of Fate”.  I have no idea where this came from, but the guy that invented it must have thought it was the coolest shit ever. I bet he tried to get it into a dozen other scripts, like You, Me, and Dupree, before someone finally took the bait. The real Fraternity has meetings, and operates democratically, voting on appropriate courses of action for world domination, etc.

Wesley Gibson is a killer

Wesley’s father was not known as “the Wolf” or “Cross”, but rather he was simply known as “the Killer”, a super, bad-ass assassin that actually could shoot the wings off of flies.  And when “The Killer” was killed he left everything to his son, under the condition that Wesley take up the mantle for six months. After a day of heavy thinking, Wesley goes on his rampage of rape, murder, and mayhem in order to become a millionaire, thus sealing his admittance into “the Fraternity”.
 

The Fox was a ho

She wore fox ears and skimpy clothes, and slept with Wesley’s dad, then with Wesley.  She wasn’t such a prude/tease, nor was she half of the badass portrayed by Angelina Jolie, all faux-mysterious and fully equipped with a sad origin story.
 

The bad guys were the bad guys

In a world controlled by super-villains, there will eventually be some double-crossing. What else would you expect? There are no heroes here.
 

Essentially the movie took a true anti-hero, morally defunct story of personal greed and sociopathic rage that literally gives the finger to the status quo, and turned it into a regular shoot ‘em up, special effects laden, action thriller with clearly defined good guys and bad guys.  The story was never meant to be that cut and dry. If you actually pick up the graphic novel you may catch yourself cheering Wesley on as you read, even though some of the things he does are pretty horrific.  But go ahead and cheer. This story makes it fun to root for the bad guy.
 

-Joshua J. Hamilton