Wanted

Wanted. Terrible movie. However, it is based off of a graphic novel by Mark Millar. I like Millar, he has a keen eye for widescreen, easy to follow, exciting combat. When he took over the Authority he made that comic sing. He also has a severely nasty side, a part of him which is just plain old flat out mean. It makes for a fun read. It also makes Wanted what it is.

What is it? Well that's complicated. See I am excited by little life improvement sorts of things. Movies like The Shipping News, American Beauty, The Ref, really strike a chord with me. Funny Kevin Spacey seems to really dominate that genra. Anyway, the idea that someone, usually a man, wakes up one day hates his life, and changes it. In American Beauty he decides to change it for himself. In The Shipping News he gets a tremendous amount of help from his Aunt...oh hey Fight Club fits in there. Then this person sets out to become something diffrent. Something that doesn't conform to societal norms, or just people rebelling against the rut that life has set them in. I like stories like this.

Wanted is kind of like that. Except it has that crappy 00 rock turned up to 11 the whole time, everything is about murder and sex, and money. The story is about an over privalaged 23 year old boy with confrontation issues. In essance he is a looser. The thing is that he never stops being a loser, he is more of a loser who can kill anyone though. I never once like him, and I am immeaditly more interested by the people around him. At one point he wonders why exactly he just decided to kill an entire police station, and someone has to tell him that it is okay to just sit around all day and watch tv sometimes. Everything doesn't have to be eXtreme. It doesn't really seem to stick though.

No matter. I set the stage well enough. The point is that the book makes no bones about the fact that the main charecter is a fucktart. It just so happens that he is a fucktart who comes into his own. Most of the stuff in this genra gets all preachy about how the stuff we own owns us, we need to live life to the fullest, or some sort of thing like that. Wanted doesn't do that. The charecter is immeadiatly given everything he could ever need want or desire and with nothing out of reach he chooses to be an asshole, and the book is okay with that. To be fair he was a looser first.

There is something about Wanted that should bother me. Like how Juvenile it is, or how fascinated with itself it can be, or something along those lines. Yet it has a sort of critical honesty with itself. Something you just don't see very often. While the message isn't very uplifting, happy, or soulful, it realizes that it is a book about a prick being a bigger prick and it is perfectly okay with that. Somehow I manage to respect that. Its strange just about every instinct inside of me screams out that I should detest this book. I should be ashamed I own it and I should mistrust anyone who likes it, and yet at the end up the day I like it myself far to much to be able to condem anyone else for reading it. Weird.