May
31
Un-Wanted
Filed Under Blockbusters, Comics, Movies
Mark Millar is currently one of my favorite comic book writers. He is the modern-day Stan Lee, a magician of the medium. Almost any superhero or team book he takes on is fried gold during his run. He writes comics that are better than most movies, giving you the impression that a movie based on a Mark Millar comic would be about the greatest thing ever realized on film.
Then I saw a trailer for “Wanted.” Now I’d heard they were adapting Millar’s mini-series “Wanted,” but I thought maybe this was one of those cases of two movies having the same title. The “Wanted” I saw a trailer for — the one with Angelina Jolie that looks like Hollywood’s still trying to ape the style-over-audience-friendliness of “The Matrix films — is about an elite network of assassins; and there’s some “Bend it Like Beckham” nonsense about curving bullets that “Mythbusters” will jump all over no doubt. The “Wanted” comic book, however, is like “A Clockwork Orange” meets Marvel Comics.
The hero in the “Wanted” comics isn’t a hero at all. He’s a put-upon loser who becomes a supervillain after he discovers that his estranged father was a supervillain and that supervillains rule the world. He joins a supervillain organization and they carry out acts of supervillainy. And there’s no Morgan Freeman. That said, the characters in the comic book would wipe the floor with the characters in the movie, particularly James McAvoy, a semi-successful clone of Ewan McGregor. I’m not even sure why they bothered calling it “Wanted” and not something else entirely, like “The One Millionth Movie You Will See About Top-Secret Government Assassins Killing People in Highly Stylized Ways.”
Now the comic book is a little edgier than most of the PG-13 pap that people line up around the block for at the multiplexes. But the filmmakers could’ve softened it a touch — y’know, taken out all the rape for instance. Audiences don’t mind bad guys as central characters, so long as there are “worse” guys who they’re up against. A movie about supervillains as “heroes” would’ve been a good fit in a summer chock full of Iron Men, Hulks, Hellboys and Dark Knights. But alas, that’s not what we’re getting with this film.
A pox on the makers of “Wanted.” They removed from the material the one element that made the comic book unique. Who wants that?
-Brad Lohan
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4 Responses to “Un-Wanted”
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A pox indeed! The comic was just about the best thing I read the year it came out and the movie looks like utter crap. My real question is why Millar would write a comic with specific celebrities in mind for each character, have it drawn so they LOOK like the celebrities, and then sell away his creative control over the film is beyond me. The excuse that it would be too hard of a film to shoot is total BS. They had a sentient pile of shit in Weird Science and that was made in 1985! They could easily do it now.
Personally I could never see a studio getting away with so many pastiche villains and heroes, which were, IMHO one of the best things about the books, deciphering who was supposed to represent who. Surely the people who own the rights to Joker, Luthor, Clayface, Parasite etc would be able to sue, and and even if they got thrown out of court its still going to cost the studio a pile of money.
Anyway, below is a quote from Comic Book Resources from a guy at the Top Cow, the comic book publisher of wanted.
Mel Caylo: discussing the changes from the graphic novel. “What many people don’t know is that Wanted was optioned before the series was concluded,” Caylo said. “At that time, Mark had an idea based around a society of assassins that worked underground or behind the scenes, and that’s what the producers bought. Mark then decided to go in the direction that Earth was once populated by superheroes, but they have been vanquished … and supervillains now run the Earth [in] five major cabals that run the whole world. They went with the original concept and based the film on that.”
“A lot of fan reaction has been negative because it’s not guys running around in spandex,” Marz said, in response to the fan’s complaint. “It’s the same story. It’s the same balls to the wall action. Let’s not get our panties in a bunch because there’s no super-villains.”
Personally i think you could be right, maybe they should avoid the whole messy issue and give it another name, not because i think the company actually should need to after they bought the rights and then created a movie with a bunch of similar themes and the same story (from the protagonist’s POV at least), but because of the fact that a large portion of comic book fans seem to want to damage anything they think will not live upto their standards. I read comic books, i love cool movies, they don’t have to be the same, in fact if they were the same i would have no need to do both.
P.S. my opinions on comic book movie adaptations do not apply to Watchmen, and I feel no shame in this hypocrisy.
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