Wanted: my sanity back.

So once again, I've been had. I should have trusted my instincts, which were warning me to stay far, far away. Practically screaming at me. But a combination of peer pressure and the misguided advice of supposed experts convinced me to give it a try, and so here I sit, $12 poorer and noticeably dumber.

I went to see the new movie Wanted yesterday with some buddies. When I first saw previews for it, my reaction was "This is Crap! Stupid stupid crap! Stay away!". Usually I trust such instincts and they rarely let me down. But as I did my weekly check of movie reviews over at RottenTomatoes and Metacritic, I noticed something strange: This film was getting passing marks. Meta gave it a good overall rating, and the Tomatometer came in at a staggering 75% positive reviews, which is solid for any film and practically a perfect score for a summer action movie. Trusting the aggregated judgement of the nation's bitter, cynical professional movie watchers, I let down my guard and was convinced to give the film a shot.

Sigh. It wasn't as bad as I originally thought it would be. It was worse. A truckload of rats with bombs stuck to their bodies worse. A horrible rip off of an oh so obvious plot twist worse. Its a derailed trainwreck of a movie which falls off a mountain bridge and slams into the side of said mountain while magically not smashing the main characters into ground chuck. Its a bullet which can literally do a complete revolution around a circular room while passing through 7 different people's heads and not slowing down or stopping or being deflected off its mystic voyage. I only wish I had a magical loom which prints out binary messages using mis-sewn threads which I could decode to reveal the secret warning message about how horrible this abomination of a film was prior to shelling out my $12 for it. I'm pretty sure I could have spent that cash on the cheapest, nastiest hobo swill that can be legally sold in this country, downed it all, and have killed fewer brain cells than I did in those lost two hours of my life.

Look, I knew going it that there were going to be stretches, even outright impossibilities in this movie. Curving Bullets from a handgun? Fine. Driving a sports car with your feet while dodging rush out traffic at 100 MPH and hanging out the car window gunning down the bad guys? Sounds like half the missions in GTA. But it went too far, way way way overboard with the stupidity.

Plus, this movie is about a group of secret awesome assassins who supposedly kill the bad guys of the world with gusto in order to protect all us innocent folk. "Kill 1, save 1000" or some BS. Yet anything they do in the movie involves massive collateral damage, usually in the form of high speed car wrecks, or the aforementioned derailment of a full commuter train. I bet if they had shown Angelina Jolie's character going out to buy a gallon of milk she would have managed to knock off at least a dozen innocent people during the trip to the store. Hopefully they use FreshDirect to avoid running the body count up too much.

On a side note, I'm starting to worry about the collective judgement of our movie critics in regards to action movies. Early this year there was a huge outpouring of praise for Iron Man. It scored an incredible 93% positive on RT. 93%!!!! Most really good films fall into the high 70s or low 80s. Given the action movie/comic book movie grading curve, a 93 translates to roughly 145% for a regular film. I saw Iron Man and liked it, and I believe its easily the best recent film based on a comic book, but that's a genre where the bar isn't set very high. Was it a fun, watchable movie? Sure. Worthy of collective praise that would make most Oscar worthy films green with envy? Not on your life. So shape it up movie critics.