Sniper rifles and doughnuts
Jul. 12th, 2008 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnWe went to see Wanted today. I've really no idea what to say about it. It's insane. Usually when we go to see films I gather a few thoughts together while watching them and then totally forget to write them out, but this deserves some mention. It's... terrible, but makes absolutely no apology for its level of madness, and I don't think I've laughed quite so much at a film since Van Helsing.
On the surface the plot involves a pathetic office worker who becomes an assassin, but you'd be hard pressed to remember because most of the time is spent wondering what just happened. There was a time when absolutely everything tried to copy the style of The Matrix, and this revives that, but exaggerates it beyond any reasonable proportions. In a way rather like Devil May Cry, you get the feeling it's fully aware how stupid it's got to be to get attention, and every scene in it has a strange dream-like quality in that you get the sense that it just can't happen. It's impossible to run so fast out of the fiftieth floor of a building that you make it all the way to the tower on the other side of the road while shooting three bullets in mid-air, one of which goes round a corner. It's even more impossible to flip a car over another by ramming a third car at it head-on, braking with one while accelerating with the other, and then to shoot someone through the sunroof of the target car while you're upside down. And you absolutely cannot hit somebody squarely in the back of a head with a giant sniper rifle across about a mile and a half of city, en route going straight through a can of Red Bull and a doughnut. But all these events take place in the film and are treated as perfectly plausible.
The rare occasions where someone isn't being punched in the face or blown up manage to test the limits of plausibility as well. The storyline of the film involves the wimpy protagonist being introduced into a secret society of weavers who have their headquarters in something resembling Fort Boyard, and who assassinate targets based on a binary code written out microscopically by (I promise you) the Loom of Fate. At least the plot point later on is a surprise (there's only the one).
You would think after all that there's no chance a film could be anything other than an action parody, but it's rather worrying that it's difficult to tell whether it's taking itself seriously or not. The awful emo-metal shoot-em-up section near the end stands out above all the rest of it as lacking a hint of irony. And that comes just before a crucial scene that relies on your ability to suspend disbelief that a bullet can be fired in such a way that it travels in a 360 degree circle.
This week on Mythbusters...
On the surface the plot involves a pathetic office worker who becomes an assassin, but you'd be hard pressed to remember because most of the time is spent wondering what just happened. There was a time when absolutely everything tried to copy the style of The Matrix, and this revives that, but exaggerates it beyond any reasonable proportions. In a way rather like Devil May Cry, you get the feeling it's fully aware how stupid it's got to be to get attention, and every scene in it has a strange dream-like quality in that you get the sense that it just can't happen. It's impossible to run so fast out of the fiftieth floor of a building that you make it all the way to the tower on the other side of the road while shooting three bullets in mid-air, one of which goes round a corner. It's even more impossible to flip a car over another by ramming a third car at it head-on, braking with one while accelerating with the other, and then to shoot someone through the sunroof of the target car while you're upside down. And you absolutely cannot hit somebody squarely in the back of a head with a giant sniper rifle across about a mile and a half of city, en route going straight through a can of Red Bull and a doughnut. But all these events take place in the film and are treated as perfectly plausible.
The rare occasions where someone isn't being punched in the face or blown up manage to test the limits of plausibility as well. The storyline of the film involves the wimpy protagonist being introduced into a secret society of weavers who have their headquarters in something resembling Fort Boyard, and who assassinate targets based on a binary code written out microscopically by (I promise you) the Loom of Fate. At least the plot point later on is a surprise (there's only the one).
You would think after all that there's no chance a film could be anything other than an action parody, but it's rather worrying that it's difficult to tell whether it's taking itself seriously or not. The awful emo-metal shoot-em-up section near the end stands out above all the rest of it as lacking a hint of irony. And that comes just before a crucial scene that relies on your ability to suspend disbelief that a bullet can be fired in such a way that it travels in a 360 degree circle.
This week on Mythbusters...
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 07:37 pm (UTC)My brother enjoyed it because they, like, flipped a car off another car and then shot somebody, but I have a hard on for Newtonian physics.
I bought in to some of the daft stuff.
They can bend bullets. Fine.
He has really fast reactions. Fine.
She can fire a bullet that goes straight through about twelve people without sloing or being diverted in a perfect circle. Fine, that's her special skill.
With his really fast reactions, he can be hit in the head with a flyover at 60mph and not have his skull smashed open like a watermelon. Not fine.
He drives a car straight on at another car, also travelling in a straight direction and uses it to fly 90 degrees to the side. In no way is that fine.
Also, the bit in his assault on the mill where he jammed his gun into the Repairman's mouth, shot it and kept on running through the mill shooting with his gun still stuck in the man's head. That was a) highly implausible and b) sick.
A lot of what I've seen from Marc Millar looks like it would read better if you're a sweaty palmed 15 year old boy. He was the man who wrote Marvel's Civil War which, after a good start, just becomes characters acting according to the demands of the plot, rather than the other way around. It's not great.
Finally, the film adaptation missed out the bit that I was looking forward to in the whole film. The film (and book) ends with Wesley shooting people and saying how great he is and how crap you are. In the film, the last line is "What have you done recently", or something like that, while in the book, the last line is "And this is my face while I'm fucking you in the ass."
That should tell you most of what you need to know about Wanted.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 05:15 pm (UTC)The shooting-through-the-head thing does sound awful, though.