Wanted

Another comic book. And I thought it was sort of interesting—even though bloody and sadistic, but that goes with the territory, doesn’t it?—for about the first hour. Shooting the wings off flies and making bullets curve with your mind fall within the parameters of speculative fiction, I have no problem with that. (I do wonder, though, how in some scenes Angelina Jolie can curve the bullets, and in others she fires off scores of rounds and only manages to hit the windshield of the pursuing car. Apparently the deadly accuracy only works when the plot requires it.) Then, as these things almost always do, it goes apeshit. It had already lost me long before the passenger train cars dangled off the tracks in the mountains (very strong couplers on those cars!), so by the time the train finally plunged 1000 miles into the ravine (well, it looked like it) KILLING EVERYONE ON BOARD EXCEPT THE SUPER-HUMAN COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS!!!! … I was yawning. I mean … I guess it’s a matter of what we’ve gotten used to. You’ve seen 10,000 car chases by now. Maybe when you started seeing them, you might have wondered what happened to all those innocent bystanders in the cars our hero and the fleeing/chasing villain hit during the 10 minutes of mayhem. Surely there were some fatalities, I mean, those were bad crashes, weren’t they? I’ll bet you seldom think of it now. Smash! Screech! Crunch! Oh, look, a baby has been thrown from that car, and here comes a bus, and it’s squashing the baby … but we don’t show that, do we? This is all in fun. And I’m not trying to be a total spoilsport here, I enjoy a good car chase. But we have crossed over into LaLa land and I wonder if we can ever get back to anything approaching reality? There must have been 500, 600 people on that train, and believe me, none of them could have survived. They’re all dead, men, women, and little babies. But Angelina and James McAvoy, who caused the train to plunge, are the good guys! And they survive! Do you recall a time when, if the hero fell 20 stories to the ground below, he at least hit an awning, or landed in a convenient dumpster full of kapok … a time when the writer and director at least made a nod to the laws of physics, at least supplied a quasi-plausible reason for survival? No more. In the last reel of The Dark Knight Batprick falls at least seven stories, lands on his back on hard ground, and gets up, brushes himself off without even a crick in his neck. And both the mass killers in Wanted survive the train plunge. I can take a certain degree of implausibility, it can be funny … but come on! Come on, people! Are any of you out there enjoying this crap? I guess you are, you keep lining up to see it. And, sadly, so have I. But I am going to be seeing less and less of it, if I see any at all.