NYCC '08: WANTED MOVIE PANEL

[MichaelDoran]

Report by Anthony Duignan-Cabrera

You can always tell when Angelina Jolie has a hit movie on her hands’; it nestles comfortably next to one of the many large loud guns she brandishes on screen.
Case-in-point: Wanted, Universal Pictures’ anti-hero action film loosely based on Mark Millar’s comic book mini-series.

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Kazakh-born writer and director of the supernatural Russian blockbusters Nightwatch and Daywatch, Wanted is no traditional superhero costume epic. Drawing from his kinetic use of camera zooms and CGI-transforming reality, the director has chosen to make a world of super assassins uncomfortably like ours, but having a violent, almost alternate dimension just below the surface where Jolie’s character, Fox and her cohorts thrive.

Along with Jolie, Wanted stars Morgan Freeman and Scottish actor James McAvoy as Wesley, the film’s protagonist, the son of a super assassin, gifted or cursed with a rare heart condition which gives him amazing powers of marksmanship.

Low key and convivial, Bekmambetov told the audience at the Wanted New York Comic Con panel Saturday that it was Universal that courted him to direct the actioner. “I liked this comic book,” he said. “What I was trying to do was to be careful with the tone and the characters. I liked the characters. We just changed elements (of the comic), but the basis is the same.”

The director said that Mark Millar was involved from the beginning. “He was on the set while shooting,” Bekmambetov said. “He was very scared because we changed a lot.”

When asked why he decided to eschew the costumes of the characters in the original material, Bekmambetov shrugged: “There are so many movies with characters in costumes. I think it’s better how different they are inside. They are real super assassins. If you met a super assassin walking down the street in leather, you would know they are an assassin. It’s very unprofessional.”

Bekmambetov showed two extended clips from the flick. The first being an extended action sequence that shows Jolie’s Fox saving Wesley from the hitman who killed his father. Like in the director’s previous movies, the sequence movies quickly from large open shots of chaos to nose-hair parsing close-ups and back out in mere seconds. We see scenes from the movie’s trailer with Fox and the hitman tearing up a pharmacy with major fire-power than careening through a parking lot onto the streets of walk look like Queens. The piece de resistance is when Fox catapults the car she and Wesley are in over a police roadblock, tipping over a moving bus with the impact then driving off to safety all the while Wesley begs to be let out on the next corner.

“Wesley, the hero of the movie, is very self-ironic,” Bekmambetov said. “It’s a wondrous way to survive in the world of the super assassin. He stays a human being even if he is a killer.”

The next clip showed Wesley waking in Fox’s lair with Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and The Gunsmith (played by the rapper Common). There Sloan forces Wesley to shoot the wings off a bunch of flies, using the fear of being capped by The Gunsmith to unleash his hidden potential. We learn that Wesley’s heart beats at 400 beats-per-minute and that it is a rare gift that he should learn to control.

This is a topic Bekmambetov enjoys and in many ways is a common theme through all his movies. In the Nightwatch series “the Others”, both Dark or Light, walk the world like ordinary folk, but can unleash awful powers.

“We are all super assassins,” the director told the audience. “We can do more than we do know. We are only spending a small percentage of our resources.”

For Wesley, learning to harness his power is liberating: “He discovers a world where he can be real.”

While Bekmambetov hinted that he would like to make Duskwatch, the final installment of the Nightwatch trilogy, it didn’t seem likely in the foreseeable future and that people would have to accept Wanted as the final chapter.

“For the moment this is Duskwatch for me,” he said. “It’s really the same genre, different story but same genre. Unfortunately I don’t know if Duskwatch will happen.”

As for sequels to Wanted, he remained philosophical: “In July we will talk about it.”

[Clem]

Millar was right to be afraid of changes. The whole point of the book was how supervillains won and wiped the heroes off the face of the Earth. If you have a director who shuns the actual concept, maybe you've got the wrong guy for the job. Sorry, but assassins don't cut it with me.

[J.L.]

Agreed.

The movie sure doesn't sound like the comic.

Originally Posted by Wanted: Plot

The premise of Wanted is that all the world's super-villains decided to band together in 1986 and use their vast collective powers — including mad science, magic and mind control — to eliminate all the world's superheroes and rewrite reality in their own dark image; in essence an in-story retcon. Prior to this the world was a brighter, more hopeful place (a clear reference to the end of the Silver Age[citation needed]). Superheroes are remembered as fiction (as they are in the real world), and behind the scenes a cabal of the leading super-villains run the entire world.

[J. Dincauze]

If you'd been paying attention at all, they've said that from the beginning, that it was deviating pretty heavily from the book... From what Millar has said in interviews, it's actually got closer to the source material when Bekmambetov took over. I'm sure the studio wanted to make them 100% good guys, but Timur brought the bad back to it.

[Clem]

Originally Posted by J. Dincauze

If you'd been paying attention at all, they've said that from the beginning, that it was deviating pretty heavily from the book... From what Millar has said in interviews, it's actually got closer to the source material when Bekmambetov took over. I'm sure the studio wanted to make them 100% good guys, but Timur brought the bad back to it.

I know, but it's the age old question of "why adapt something if you're not adapting it at all?".

I remember reading an interview with the screenwriters, who freely admit they'd barely read 2 issues before scripting it. Same goes for Millar's latest series KICK-ASS. Barely a couple of issues on the stands and it's being adapted for screen without even knowing where the story is going.

The norms will lap it up as another lame Angelina Jolie vehicle, but anyone who's read the comic is gonna blow a fuse. Would it really have been so hard to let Millar finish his mini and find a director who wanted to adapt it as it is?

Will the credits read "Based loosely on 2 issues of Mark Millar's WANTED"?

[G Dog]

Originally Posted by Clem

Will the credits read "Based loosely on 2 issues of Mark Millar's WANTED"?

Will you cry if they don't?

[Clem]

Originally Posted by G Dog

Will you cry if they don't?

Will you cry if i don't?

[kalorama]

Does it matter how "faithful" the movie is the comic as long as the movie is well done and entertaining? And does not being slavishly faithful to the source material guarantee the film will not be good? No and no.

Originally Posted by Clem

The norms will lap it up as another lame Angelina Jolie vehicle, but anyone who's read the comic is gonna blow a fuse.

As someone who read the comic (and, admittedly found it unsatisfying in every way but the visuals) I fully expect to leave the theater with my fuses intact.

[Clem]

Originally Posted by kalorama

Does it matter how "faithful" the movie is the comic as long as the movie is well done and entertaining? And does not being slavishly faithful to the source material guarantee the film will not be good? No and no.

But once you take the powered element out of the story, the whole mini is essentially gutted. No rogues, no bigger picture, no subtext, it's all gone.

Sorry, but i subscribe to the Zack Snyder school of "if it worked on the page, why f*ck with it".

[kalorama]

Originally Posted by Clem

But once you take the powered element out of the story, the whole mini is essentially gutted. No rogues, no bigger picture, no subtext, it's all gone.

None of which will or should matter to the vast majority of the film's (as opposed to the comic's) audience if the result is a quality film.

[PaKent]

I'm actually looking forward to this one, myself. You always hear about villains wanting to take over the world, but you never actually SEE it happen. I love Millar's take on how evil would cope with itself once it gets what it wants; Wanted is one of my favorite graphic novels, and has a warm place on my bookshelf! I don't mind the change from supervillains to assassains, as long as they STAY bad. I know there's that thing in the trailer about them balancing the world or whatnot, but I get the feeling that, considering the source material for the story, balancing the world probably isn't the TRUE motive of the group.

I'll be there for the midnight screening; sign me up!

(BTW, I was at the NYCC - I missed this panel unfortunately, but I DID get into that ARG they're doing for the movie over at FraternityofWeavers.com, thanks to the goofy little sewing kit in my swag bag!)