f13.net

So, trailer's released for the movie adaptation of Wanted.  Looks like they gutted alot of the plot/background of the comic.  My hopes for the movie are dimmed a bit. 

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809878244/video/477

Yeah, the Wanted movie has ditched all the DC-homage / parodies and replaced it with a generic 'assassins who kill for good' plot, at least from this trailer.

Plus the Wesley character was just annoying. Solid cast though.

I can't believe this even got greenlighted. I thought the comic was extremely immature, on the level of say...that Postal video game.

That is a good cast though. Maybe McAvoy can make it interesting.

I've never read the book. The trailer I'm unsure about. On the one hand, I like the guy playing the main character, as he was fantastic in Last King of Scotland. But goddamnit, Jolie just annoys me now, especially playing an assassin after Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Probably be a decent popcorn flick for a DVD rental.

The comic started from an interesting idea - that the villains won. But Millar glossed over the interesting bits (as is his tendency), seemed to love flipping the bird at the audience and it ended with some kind of weird rant that Millar meant to no doubt inspire but just left me going, "... huh, right".

Yeah, I thought the premise was cool, but it pretty much went downhill from there.

My greatest joy was in seeing a Wanted villain and trying to link him / her back to the DC original. And how the Superman villains controlled America while the Batman villains got stuck with Australia.

None of which appears to be in the film.

Still, solid cast. The script can't suck too badly on the face of it for Terence Stamp, Morgan Freeman and Angelia Jolie to all sign up to it.

Terrence Stamp was in Elektra.

Morgan Freeman was in Chain Reaction.

Angelina Jolie was in the Tomb Raider movies.

It's quite possible they all took on a shitty movie.

McAvoy is the key, man.

Though I have absolutely nothing against Morgan Freeman either. Chain Reaction didn't exist.

The comic was pretty juvenile in parts, but the basic premise and idea was pretty cool.  The execution was just flawed. 

A movie would have been a good way to remedy that, and make the whole thing golden.  Alas, it seems they've taken out most of the good along with the bad.  Which makes no sense, as comic book related stuff is doing pretty good lately.

How about Hard Rain? heehee

It's not a perfect way of knowing quality - perhaps they are all getting big pay cheques for this movie, or all had some down time or something - but for all of them to sign on isn't necessarily a bad thing.

... of course, "Eragon" had Jeremy Irons, Robert Carlisle and John Malkovich in it...

/yawn

Dungeons and Dragons had Jeremy Irons in it.

I think he and Ben Kingsley have a competition on to see who can appear in the worst film in the role they care the least about. Kingsley is currently winning.

For.... ?

BloodRayne?

I think Kingsley said he did it because he wanted to do something his grandkids could watch. Too bad the guy wasn't too savvy about the details.

[EDIT]

And on that note, the perfect "grandkid" movie for Kingsley would have been a Spidey flick. As Vulture. Instead, they scrapped the idea, and wrote a movie about Venom instead.

Kingsley said he wanted to do a VAMPIRE movie as a vampire.

He obviously knew the movie would have sucking in it.  :rimshot:

Doh! Haemish, that was awful.  :awesome_for_real:

Ben Kingsley has no excuse for Bloodrayne. He is a fucking dolt for that. It's a Uwe Bol movie for crying out loud!

So, it sounds like I shouldn't read this comic until after I've seen the movie.  I'd never heard of it before, but what I saw in the trailer entertained me.

Bloodrayne
A Sound of Thunder
What Planet Are You From?
... and The Love Guru doesn't look promising.

Don't get me wrong - Jeremy Irons has given it a red hot go, with

The Time Machine
Dungeons and Dragons
Eragon

but he's just not been able to keep up.

The comic and the movie appear to have little in common. If you can read the comics for free somewhere, do that - I didn't feel it was fleshed out enough to recommend that someone buy it.

I thought it was funny.. Shandling doesn't make enough movies, I say!


I *glanced* at Eragon yesterday on HBO. You guys are overblowing it's suckage. It's a mediocre movie to be sure, but not even remotely close to Uwe Boll levels. Irons was still good in it too. Same goes for the Time Machine.

Uwe Boll is hardly the worst director out there. He just attracts nerd rage by getting the rights to video game movies and then disregarding everything about the game. Plus the man has an ego that could stop an anti-tank round.

Given the choice, I'd rather watch Bloodrayne again than Dungeons and Dragons. But Kingsley does a worse job than Irons in most of those films mentioned - Kingsley really looks like he's in it for the paycheque whereas Irons gives it a shot at least.

No, Uwe Boll is pretty damn bad. But perhaps a step above Skinemax directors, if that's what you mean by "hardly the worst director out there".

As for video game movies -- they've always sucked. That's to be expected. And believe it or not, I actually don't give a shit about video games that much to care about whether directors are "faithful" to the source material or not. I just don't. Video games are already a shitty storytelling medium to begin with, and Uwe Boll sucks on a general directorial level.

[edit] Wait... How the fuck did I get sucked into this? You guys are saying that Wanted may suck because it has Jeremy Irons in it... Because he was in Eragon?

That's silly.

If anything though, this movie will suck because the comic sucked. I said that in my first post here, and should have just left it at that.

No, this all started because I said it had a strong cast and Ironwood pointed out a strong cast can sign onto a bad movie e.g. Eragon.

I'd rather watch a Skinemax movie personally.

Watched it.  Was mostly interested in seeing it because it's from the director that did Nightwatch and Daywatch, doing his first movie in the U.S..  Overall it wasn't bad.  Had a lot of fun parts to it.  Wasn't overly fond of the ending, and though I haven't seen Wall-E or Hancock yet (we're allowed to start playing Hancock at 7:00PM on Tuesday of all times), I couldn't really recommend seeing Wanted over either of those if you're planning on going to the movies sometime within the next couple weeks.

I have only one question, will it be alright watching it on small screen or will it be too easy to see all the flaws when I'm not awed by the shiney and the noise?

I wasn't all that awed by the shiney.  There are some cool sequences but nothing that really needs to be seen on the big screen and no special effects that you likely haven't seen elsewhere.

I saw it, it was probably the most fun I've had this summer other than Iron Man.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the graphic novel. However, from what I read on Wikipedia of the graphic novel this movie shares character names with the novel and that's about all.

This is correct - there is pretty much nothing comparable between the original Wanted series and this movie.

This movie was fucking terrible.

Yeah it kind of sucked.

Just out of curiousity you two, have you read the graphic novel? Everyone I know who has seen it has loved it but none of us have read the books so I'm wondering if that has an effect. This movie seems to different from the summary of the novels I don't know why they even bothered keeping the name(s).

Neither of us have read the graphic novel and if it wren't for this thread, we wouldn't have even known it was one.

This movie tried so fucking hard to be cool. Sooooooooo fucking hard. It really wanted to keep my adrenaline up also.

Unfortunately, you can't help compare it to Shoot'em Up which is like 900x better. Mostly though:

1. Training montages are lame.
2. Curling a bullet is the gayest thing this side of rainbows flying in hot-air balloons with rainbows on the sides looking at rainbows after some noon showers.  Over San Fran.
3. The CGI/Green Screen stuff was total shit.
4. Car going into Helicopter in Live Free or Die Hard? Ok. I can deal with that. Jumping upside down in a car over the limo while kickass music played. Ok, I can deal with that. Lodging a car in the side of a train and causing that derailment. Ok, buck stops there pal.
5. Every single actor was fucking replacable. Except for our boy from Day Watch. Morgan Freeman has become a joke of what he once was. Angelina should've been Asia Argento. Lead should've been someone else. I don't know who. Role sucked anyway. I guess the black guy was token enough. A fat meat-packing knife-fighter, had I not known this was a comic book at some point, I'd have said "This is so silly it should be in comics." Because it was. And I thought the guy frmo MI-5 was wasted. I think he was from MI-5. Anyway...

My big question is, if they had followed the source material (since I hadn't read it), would it have been good? Because what we just saw, that was fucking shit.

I loved it :)

Well, 'good' is subjective.  I liked the comic more than the movie.  

Important details that the comic didn't fuck up:

1. Not every character was a super-gunslinger.  Only the main character and his dad had that specific superpower.
2. The bullets didn't curve.
3. There was no loom of fate.
4. The brotherhood was a group of super-villains.  No mamby-pamby bullshit about helping the world through assassinations, they were balls-out about being villains.
5. The 'twist' from the movie didn't happen in the comic.

The book's main character was somehow even more two-dimensional than the movie's character, though, if you can believe it.  It took about ten pages before he was just murdering everyone in sight.

Oh right the loom of fate. That was also fucking awful.

Plot fell apart too quickly for me.  The best parts of the movie were the ones with the most significant lines translated to the medium (What the fuck have you done lately?), but the plot itself was butchered.

As has been stated, the comics started with an interesting premise and got worse with each issue. The seeling I got from it was that they wee trying to create something on par with The Watchmen, but didn't really get what made Watchmen so good. So instead it just felt like a pale imitation with some aspects lifted from other books and movies. Mostly just mashing Watchmen and Matrix together. The ending diatribe made me proud to have never heard of the book, the prick who wrote it (Haven't bought comic since the speculation craze of the 90's), and that I downloaded it from Rapidshit.

The movie just looks like an angrier version of The Matrix with a much hotter Trinity, and a much older Morpheus. Also the curling bullets and slicing the gun horizontally while firing is cheesy as all hell.

Since this is based on a comic book I think they intended this stuff to be super powers/magic (including obviously the loom of fate) but they forgot to tell the audience this. I'm guessing the slicing the gun horizontally thing was supposed to get the idea across that the bullets were curving because the motion of the gun put a spin/curl on them. Which directly contradicts the idea that it is a super power/magic.

OTOH, I'd have to see it again but I don't remember the other characters doing this so it might have just been a crutch for the main character since he was new at it.

His "super power" was the speeding up his pulse to 400 beats per minute.  The gun curving was training that they could all use.

Debatable about Lips being hotter.

... aaaaand that makes you super, why?  What mystical power is this supposed to convey upon super-pulse boy?

Able to be more precise and react faster than a normal human as that's his version of bullet time.

Sounds more like a recipe for a super-stroke.

I'm sure the movie's version of biology is consistent with its take on physics.

Hahahhaahwhaahahha wat? Carrie Ann Moss? I don't even like Angelina Jolie that much, but comeon. You must be kidding me. Hahahahahhahahaohoooooooooooooooooooo. No. Sorry. Just no.

Consider the source.

I did. And I still couldn't bring myself to agree. Just completely ridiculous.

I can see it.

Bear in mind that she doesn't ring everyones bell.

I know guys that think she is ugly, too.  So I might be crazy, but I'm not alone.

No, I found Carrie Ann Moss to be hot as well, just... differently. I'd she's a pomegranate to Angelina Jolie's tangerine.

Also, CAM was looking pretty... questionable in the last two matrix movies. On the same note, the Jolie that was in Gia was much hotter than the one today.

Yeah, Carrie-Anne Moss during the last two Matrix movies wasn't really attractive at all.

Memento CAM and Wanted Jolie really just come down to preference I feel.

Let's get back on topic - Wanted.

I saw it a few nights ago, I thought it was great, but I have a knack for putting the blinders on in the name of entertainment.

A few things bugged me though, like THE LOOM OF FUCKING FATE, WHAT THE FUCK?!  The best backstory someone can come up with is a group of WEAVERS formed an elite assassination squad that changed the world? Jesus tapdancing christ.

The one thing that really stuck out though, was how after everyone suddenly realizes that everything Sloan had said was a lie, they just take for face value the fact that they too had magical loom of fate death cards.

You think it would've crossed Fox's mind that either a) He's just trying to save his ass, so he filled out form 173(c) with our names and stapled them to scraps of burlap or b) the fact that they had been following the wrong orders the entire time is why The Loom decided they had to go, and that discovering Sloans deception nullified their Loom Death Warrants(tm) as they weren't following his orders anymore.

But whatever, the 360 degree bullet was neat, and I really want to get a job at a gun range now so I can watch kids show up and try to curve bullets, I'm all about a front row seat to the darwin awards.

As for myself, I'd prefer not to be in the same room as a dumb kid waving a gun from side to side while firing wildly, but take some pictures for me, eh?

They already hold it sideways while "punching" bullets at the target, that's always good for a laugh.

I don't know.  The Loom of Fate sort of worked for me.  They weren't out to CHANGE the world, so much as they were out to preserve the natural balance / order of the world.  I completely imagine that under the "orders" of the Loom, they probably offed just as many people who could have done "great good" as "great evil".  If the whole idea is that the random nature of the weaving brings up the name, and offing the person attached to the name helps preserve a "balance", it sort of makes sense.  The only part about it that bugged me was that the code was in Binary.  I don't know how old the Fraternity was, but i'm pretty sure that binary code you can attach to letters of the alphabet didn't exist in the middle ages.

As the second part, I think all the motivation Fox would have needed to off everyone in the room, self included, was wrapped up pretty neatly in her little backstory setup in the movie.  If she knew Sloan's name had come up and he had buried it, she would have no reason to doubt that him not killing himself probably had a cascade effect that would pull in every other member of the fraternity along with it once he broke the Code and decided to use the fraternity as his own personal organization instead of "fates" organization.

Her back story also explains why she would never let a name legitimately drawn survive either.  If a name comes up, it HAS to go, cause it is fucking with fate's intended design.  Fate doesn't hand out "Get out of Jail free" cards.

Loom of Fate is  :drillf:. Sorry.

I kind of liked the concept of the loom of fate only because I really liked Greek Mythology when I had the opportunity to take it as a class in lieu of English in high school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirae

I liked the whole Loom of Fate bit because it was obvious bullshit to illuminate the point:  just because you have a freaky superpower, you don't have any greater moral authority.  The protagonist's "just a thug who can bend a bullet" line.

Comic book movies are pretty rampant with massively awful justification for why the superhero can go out and be a vigilante.  Spiderman's "great responsibility", Superman's dad, Batman's parents, etc.

The utter lunacy of the Loom of Fate points a spotlight at that moral justification and says sit the fuck down, you are no different than anyone else.

Whoa, stop there.  Is this statement based off of actual eyewitnessed behavior at a shooting range?  Because if it is, my next question is why those idiots weren't backhanded by someone competent and given real instruction on shooting.

Because the dude who shows up the range wearing a basketball jersey 4 sizes too large and pants below his ass isn't the kind of person that I want to know how to shoot properly.  If you want to go around looking like a little gangbanger, don't expect to be treated like anything else.

I dug this actually. Good/unique action flick. And Angelina is still hot. Actually, hotter than ever.

I like McAvoy, but he was unusually whiny in this... but I guess that was in character.

I didn't like the comics (commented on them in this board section a long while back), but the movie is entertaining.

[edit] It's as good as Equilibrium. I'll say that.

(http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/6562/0whoazu6.jpg)

DON'T LIE TO US. DON'T LIE TO US EVER.

Thought it that bad, eh?  :|

Fairly original story, good actors, kick ass action.. The finale is as good as, if not better, than Equilibrium's at least.

I've always thought that Equilibrium would have been a better film if I hadn't understood the dialogue (or French with subtitles for the film snob factor).  Good action but not much else.

I hope the Region 1 DVD has some crazy language on it so I can test this out...

Equilibrium was good, maybe even great.  Wanted was just mediocre.

Actually, "mediocre" might be giving it too much credit.  That's what I rated it as without having read the comic.  Having subsequently read the comic, I'm inclined to slide it down to "bad" due to wasted potential.  Constantine is the same way.

Man, Constantine rocked!  :grin:

Yes, I like Keanu.  :oh_i_see:

"Constantine" was good, but it was no Hellblazer.