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In a sleek, sinister bid to prove she's not ready for sanctification quite yet, erstwhile earth mother and global healer Angelina Jolie takes on a gats-and-tats role as a gorgeous assassin in Wanted, an action-thriller with a mean streak as wide as Shaikh Zayed Road.
“There's a side to me that people know that is a humanitarian, there's a side to me that is a mummy, but I think like all women there is a side to me that likes to get down and dirty and have fun and jump around," she says. “And I'd missed that a little and I think it's good for me to do that every once in a while."
Jolie joined a stellar cast on Wanted including James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman directed by Russian filmmaker, Timur Bekmambetov, who won international acclaim with the highly original fantasy thriller Night Watch and its successful sequel, Day Watch.
“The reason I decided to do Wanted was because I had seen some of Timur's films and I had met him and I thought ‘no matter how this turns out, there's no way it's going to be an average action movie'," she explains.
Evolution of an assassin
“I knew that he would bring some very interesting textures to it that are from ancient Russian story telling, from the European sensibility, and from his time at art school. He's a real artist and I knew that it wasn't just going to be that flashy summer cheap thing. I knew that he would do something neat with everything and push things. And he did."
McAvoy plays, Wesley Gibson, whose mundane, nine to five life is turned upside down when he discovers he is not the “apathetic loser" he always believed was his destiny. He is, in fact, the heir of a highly trained assassin who worked for a shadowy crime-fighting organisation called The Fraternity led by Sloan (Freeman).
“James's character really represents every guy with the bad job and a girlfriend who is cheating on him. Everything about him isn't cool," says Jolie. “And then he is brought into this thing, The Fraternity, and we change his life and he becomes one of us."
“But it's interesting because it's James's introduction into action movies so people will be watching his transformation into it directly, and he does do it, he's very physical and he's great."
Jolie plays, Fox, a heavily tattooed, deadly assassin who hauls Gibson out of his “ordinary life" into the potentially lethal world of crime fighting where The Fraternity identify criminals to execute before they cause mayhem and loss of life.
The big question
While emphasising that Wanted is an action thriller, she does believe that the theme of the film does provoke an interesting moral question.
“If for example The Fraternity was just a bunch of people that killed for fun and enjoyed torturing people and just killing, then I wouldn't be interested in doing it," she says.
“I liked the idea that if you knew there were people who you knew were going to kill other people in the future, should you take them out? And I think that's interesting in a bigger political way."
“You look at the world today and you say ‘do we have enough?' Like, for example, we have this international criminal court that can issue arrest warrants for Darfur and the Congo and other places but are we ready to back it up? And yet if we don't back up these things, what's the other solution?"
“Do we just go to war and kill a bunch of civilians in the process because we can't handle this? And say ‘you're a bad guy, get out and get on trial. We'll deal with you...' Instead we're going to start a whole war. It doesn't sound right. So in one way it sounds aggressive and saying ‘let's deal with bad people in a very strong way' but I think there does need to be something to prevent other kinds of violence."
James on Angie
Acting alongside Angelina Jolie, one of the biggest stars in the world, was a rewarding experience. James McAvoy was charmed by his co-star and says that beneath the near constant glare of media scrutiny that surrounds Jolie's life, there's a friendly, down to earth actress who does her best to make everyone feel at ease.
“She is a really nice woman," he says. “Good fun and down to earth. It's always been the case, I've found, that the bigger hype there has been about an actress or a singer or someone like that, the more rumours there are, the more normal they are."
“Angelina has this mad life, but she is in the middle of it just being as nice as she can be to people every day and I really respected her for that. And she's a great actress, too. I really enjoyed working with her."
As for the director who conceived the Wanted bloodbath, Timur Bekmambetov, McAvoy called him “cuddly".
“He is a very, very sweet guy," says McAvoy. "All these weird, dark ideas come out of his head but you talk to him and you realise that he's not like that.
‘I'm a dork'
“[My kids] will finally think I'm cool," says Angelina Jolie about her role in Wanted. “My son will ask me to play a video game and I suck at it. And I'm terrible and Brad's terrible. We are both terrible. And mum is the dork who can't figure out the plugs. So one day they'll see the films and see that mum is not a total dork.
The battle of the summer comic-book oops, graphic-novel — movies continues with Wanted. I enjoyed Iron Man, mainly because of Robert Downey Jr, and tolerated the far-from-incredible Incredible Hulk. The first major Hollywood feature from the Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, whose Night Watch and Day Watch were the two highest-grossing films in Russian history, Wanted is easily the most cinematically expert of the current crop of comic-book extravaganzas.
But in a way, that's what's wrong with it. The film's high proficiency is at the service of a concept that can most accurately be defined as sadomasochistic. I thought these comic movies were supposed to be fun. The only people likely to devour Wanted are wolverines.
Once again we are presented with a scrawny dweeb, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), who breaks out of his humdrum existence to become a hero or antihero. Or not-quite-superhero. Whatever.
Comic-book movies are always quick to remind us that deep down many of their headliners are ordinary human beings like you and me. This isn't quite accurate unless you happen to believe that a bloated green giant or a kid whizzing between skyscrapers in a spider suit or a munitions dealer outfitted like a megacrustacean are human just because they don't defy the laws of physics. (Which, come to think of it, they often do anyway.) But I digress.
Wesley's dreary office job confines him to a cubicle, where his boss harasses him mercilessly. He chomps vegan tofu wraps and gulps vast quantities of panic-attack pills. It turns out his father was a member of an elite cadre of covert assassins known as The Fraternity, an ancient society of weavers that no doubt would give Opus Dei the willies.
By minutely examining hidden textile patterns in the Loom of Fate (don't ask), they can divine who is fated to imperil the planet and then proceed to assassinate forthwith. The Frat Rats go by such Cosa Nostra-ish names as the Repairman, the Butcher and the Exterminator. There's also a sorority sister, the appropriately named Fox, played by Angelina Jolie in quasi-Mrs. Smith/Lara Croft mode. (Her screen time is shorter than the ads would have you believe.)
Inevitably, Morgan Freeman plays the capo of the Frats, and he does so utilising those plummy, supernatural tones on which he's presumably taken out a patent. Freeman is a great actor, but in recent years he's begun his descent into Orson Welles territory his acting is becoming all about his pipes.
I suspect the reason this cabal is named The Fraternity is to justify the heavy-duty hazing that Wesley is subjected to. This is the sadomasochistic part I was warning you about. In most movies about heroes, there's a certain amount of trial-by-fire stuff, but in Wanted, Wesley is pummelled, basted, sliced, and diced until he resembles a side of rare roast beef — and that's just by his friends. It's one thing, I suppose, to be subjected to this sort of thing in a comic book. At least there the bloodletting stays on the page. (The wildly popular comic series is by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones.) But violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilised, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?
Wesley's rite of passage into manhood is synonymous with becoming a lethal killer, and Bekmambetov seems perfectly OK with this. His real interest in making this movie is working up more effective ways of depicting splatter. He's trying to one-up Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.
If we're lucky, Wanted won't be.
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