Ellen Leventry: June 2008 Archives

"Wanted" is a an intriguing mash-up of "Office Space," "Fight Club," "The DaVinci Code," and "The Matrix." You could be forgiven for thinking that this Angelina Jolie vehicle was simply another sex appeal-fueled shoot-'em-up loosely based on another graphic novel (Mark Millar's "Wanted" series). It's ad campaign certainly suggests so and the film itself is definitely not short on violence; in fact, I would label it ultra-violent. But, this story of office drone Wesley Gibson (played with perfection by "The Last King of Scotland's" James McAvoy) who finds out that he is heir to a secret fraternity of super-assassins asks some very ethically minded questions, such as: Is it OK to kill one person if you know you will be saving a thousand other people and does absolute power always corrupt absolutely?

The premise is in no way groundbreaking, indeed "Minority Report's" version of the preemptive strike killing was far more coherent, but the manner in which the fraternity receives the information is unique: The Loom of Fate. Yes, the very same loom that the Fates of Greek mythology continuously cranked away on. It seems that back in the Middle Ages a group of weavers discovered odd patterns in the woof and warp of the cloth the loom was producing and by translating those anomalies into binary came up with a set of names targeted for assassination. The Fraternity members are sworn to carry out the commands of the cloth and follow the code of one death to save one thousand. Now Wesley has been brought in to The Fraternity to find and kill the rogue agent that killed the father Wesley never knew.