[on film]

“A” for Effort:
Anghus takes in two flicks this week

By: Anghus Houvouras

Wanted: ** stars (out of four)
WALL-E: *** stars (out of four)

It was a pretty diverse week, theatrically speaking. Two films flooded into theaters, polar opposites with nothing in common other than being projected from a booth and onto a screen.

Wall-E is an animated film with moments of brilliance that eventually devolves into the most predictable of films, while Wanted is a live action shoot-‘em-up with moments of pugilistic brilliance that revels in its predictability. Both will appeal to a specific kind of moviegoer.

Wall-E appeals to kids and adults looking for a fun film with some fantastic imagery. Wanted appeals to action freaks who enjoy a heaping helping of blood, violence and stupidity. Despite their differences and deficiencies, both films have entertainment value, and both can be reluctantly recommended. I’ll start with the smarter of the two.

Wall-E is a cinematic achievement in some ways; in others it’s the ultimately unsurprising family film audiences have expected to see when watching Pixar’s annual computer-animated film about something cute faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. I know people who treat Pixar films as if they were shat from the heavens, delivered upon a wreath of golden toilet paper—even though the films are basically different only by the tiny protagonist they picked to personify.

The film tells the story of a cute little robot named Wall-E who spends his days cleaning up the garbage left behind on Earth after the humans trashed the place and headed into space. He has his routines that keep him busy, looking through the junk for interesting finds and watching tapes of old musicals.

Being the only semblance of life on Earth (other than a pet cockroach), Wall-E is rather lonely, yearning to find someone, or something, to love. It’s then that Eva shows up, another robot, though more advanced in every way. She’s sleek, powerful and looks like what would happen if Steve Jobs designed robots. Her directive on Earth is to look for signs of life—and after 700 years she has found it.

This prompts a series of events leading Wall-E to a giant cruise ship where the overweight portly remnants of the human race sit in hover chairs and chat endlessly on futuristic cell phones, spending their life in the quiet lull of laziness. It’s a none too subtle jab at American consumerism and feels weirdly out of place in a love story between two robots.

Speaking of which, I had to resist every urge to stand up in the audience and blurt out any number of robotic-themed sexual metaphors:

“Plug it in her three-pin port!”

“Is she AC or DC?”

“How about a three-way with Mr. Coffee!”

Of course, being in the presence of children, I kept these immature thoughts rattling in my head.

The subject of immaturity seems fairly relevant to begin discussing Wanted. This is a film rooted in the basics of juvenile impulses: big guns, hot women and enough blood-spattering violence to put an army of dry cleaners to work for the better part of a decade. There’s little in Wanted I would call original, as it seems to be a mish-mash of other films thrown into a blender and set on slow motion. There are bits and pieces of Fight Club and a whole lot of The Matrix.

What’s wrong with the film is that it feels less like an inspiration from earlier films as a thinly veiled remake of them.

We meet Wesley Gibson (James MacAvoy), a trifle of a man who lives a timid and meaningless existence, trapped in his cubicle with a cheating girlfriend and riddled with anxiety attacks. Everything changes when he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie) who saves him from an apparent assassination attempt and tells him that he is the son of one of the world’s most famous assassins. With his lineage, he shares some of his father’s aptitudes, which include increased speed, reflexes and the ability to bend bullets, allowing him to make impossible shots. The set-up seems like an excuse for endless montages and bullet-time effects, yet I found myself marginally entertained.

There are some sequences that defy credibility, but director Timur Bekmamatov (Nightwatch) revels in these defiantly staged action scenes, infusing them with an energy that has been lacking in most modern action films.

Rather than run from the impossibility and trying to ground the sequences, he turns them into visceral eye candy, putting Wesley and Fox through a number of action scenes which will both excite audiences and probably make them cackle. It’s not perfect—far from it. There are scenes so ludicrously staged and dialogue so terribly written that even Morgan Freeman can’t give them credibility. (Though, it was worth the price of the ticket to hear the aged stalwart actor exclaim, “Kill this motherfucker!”)

Wanted improves dramatically in its second half when it stops trying to justify its own existence and becomes a kick-ass action film, getting better once it establishes its world. Wall-E has an amazing first half but becomes a predictable kiddie film the minute it leaves the silent world it establishes. Both movies are entertaining but suffer from uneven pacing and an inability to escape the foundation upon which they’re built. Both are noble efforts worth seeing, but in a summer where the movies have been defying expectations, just being “good” seems like a bit of a letdown.