A movie filled with Rajnikanth style special effects, unbelievable actions scenes, wounds that heal in a second and a stupid plot. Sounds familiar? No, its not a Bollywood or Kollywood movie but rather the latest offering of Hollywood, ‘Wanted‘ starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman.

The movie kicks off with a pretty unrealistic scene filled with leaping from one building to another and shooting in mid-air with pinpoint precision. So therefore, around a couple of minutes into the movie, I realised that I would be sitting for the next 2 hours watching a Hollywood remake of a Rajnikanth movie defying every single law of physics, enough to make Einstein roll in his grave.

Agreed, this review is quite late and I probably should’ve watched the movie earlier, being an avid Jolie fan but the only saving grace of the movie was the 2 seconds of Angelina’s butt. And she too is evidently  getting old and growing too thin to be healthy.

Angelina Jolie at her best.

By now you probably have understood that I did not enjoy the movie much but I have my reasons for this. The plot of the movie, in plain words, is quite bad, and doesnt really go anywhere. It twists and turns unnecessarily since it’s main motive appears to be a reason for more shooting and bullet dodging rather than anything else. Oh, and the bullet bending! God, this isnt some David Beckham football movie to bend and twist balls as you like! Of course, this was bullets, not balls, but that doesnt mean that you can alter the basics of shooting and introduce a new method of ‘bending bullets’ which was anything but convincing.

The soundtrack of the movie was possibly the worst I ever heard in a movie. I’m not blaming the sounds during the action scenes, those were perfect, but the choice of background music during the scenes was, quite frankly, very sad.

As for the acting, I have concluded that if I ever direct an action movie, I’ll make sure to never cast James McAvoy in it. He is not built for the character and cannot act like an assassin to save this life. Angelina’s performance, on the other hand was quite good and she did an excellent job at the action scenes, and I’m not saying this just because I love her. Morgan Freeman did a decent job as always, but his character in the movie was not the best and I strive to find out why he accepted the role which, under other circumstances, would’ve been played by some unknown son of the producer.

James McAvoy? Assassin? Really?

Most of action scenes were well executed using good camera angles and I was decently pleased with them. There were some scenes which were nail biting, some which made you cringe and some which were simply bad. The CGI quality during the movie varied a lot, with some very realistic looking ones to some which looked very fake.

Realism appears to have been given the least importance in the movie, seeing the various things that would not happen in real life unless god himself descended upon earth. The wounds which ‘magically’ heal in consequent scenes after having been covered in a layer of wax are only the beginning. I never knew a mere accountant could inherit superhuman properties and take any amount of beating, slow down time to get the perfect shot but yet have the least amount of common sense. I may sound a bit harsh at this point, but when you make a movie, you should either chose to make it completely realistic or completely fictional but not leave it hanging halfway between both of them, like this movie and leave the viewer in a weird state of confusion.

Morgan Freeman with his stern look.

But after having complained so much about the movie, I would say that the average viewer would probably enjoy it. One reason being that they would not dissect and analyse it as much as I do and reason two being that, just before we left the theatre, I heard someone behind me saying ‘Amazing movie’ to his friend and before we watched the movie, one of my companions told me that it was a ‘Killer movie’ which increased my expectations only to be crashed right back to the ground. Also, the fact that we got the smallest screen in the multiplex and the most uncomfortable seats didnt make the experience any better. 5.5/10

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under Movies, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.