WANTED

As someone who has read WANTED, and who enjoyed it immensely, I can’t help but feel violated for the nth time as Hollywood is releasing a motion picture based on the cult comic. The comic written by citizen pen, Mark Millar, is about a down trodden, youngish man, who is spat at by the local yoot, emasculated by his boss and cheated on by his girlfriend. He is Edward Norton in Fight Club. Our protagonist has however, the decidedly more advantageous luck of being the heir to the world’s greatest assassin’s fortune and skills. This deux ex machina is communicated to him by a femme fatale (played by Angelina Jolie in the film.) Cue the montage of training and awakening of said devastating killing efficiency.


What made the comic a more interesting proposition than the weak and clichéd synopsis might thus far entail, is that all this assassination business takes place in a world where super villains have taken over the world, the catch, no one realises. The world was divided between five arch-super villains in a mafia family type structure, after every super hero on the planet was done away with and the populace was made to forget that superheroes ever existed outside of fiction. This idea of humanity being lorded over by sinister forces that they themselves don’t realise exist sounds very similar to the plot of the Matrix Trilogy and so it’s no wonder that the wakowski brothers are directing. Lets hope it’s more Matrix than Matrix Relamented and Matrix Revulsions.

After watching the trailer for WANTED, I can make an assertion that the film will probably make the ‘Fraternity’ (the name describing the alliance of super badies) appear as a necessary evil a bit like the CIA and not as the insidious crime organization it’s made out to be in the comic. Expecting a Hollywood blockbuster to be green lit when the premise involves an ‘average jo’ who upon learning that he has both vast wealth and power (the American dream) becomes increasingly amoral with no redemption in sight might have been a bit iffy.