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...
