Wanted

I watched a wonderful movie titled “Wanted” last weekend.


This movie had the philosophical depth of ‘Fight club’ (starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton) and similarly, it had nothing to do with violence as any review of the movie would have you believe. The underlying theme of the movie is destiny and fate. Is one’s destiny in life determined by fate?

The main character is Wesley (it’s rare that I remembered the names of the characters). An accountant by professional, he suddenly found himself having the talents to be one of the greatest assassins in a brotherhood called the Fraternity. This brotherhood of assassin believes that the end justifies the mean – a theme explored by Niccolo Machavelli’s classic work “The Prince”. The assassins under the Fraternity will be issued a cloth, whose threads lay out a binary code which can be decoded to give the name of the person which had to be killed in order to preserve the fabric of life. Thus, there is a struggle within each assassin as they had to deal with the moral conflict of doing evil for a greater good.

To drive in the point of the main theme, the Fraternity also owns a yarn factory, where threads are woven into cloth. There is a special room where the encoded cloth is woven and decoded before given to the assassins to carry out the necessary. I half-expected to see three old hags inside, spinning threads into cloth. But no, they are not inside the movie, though the similarity in the Greek mythology of the old hags of Destiny and Fate – The Three Fates - is not lost on me. According to Greek legend, these old hags run a yarn operation. One of them spins the thread of life, the second allocates the length of the yarn and the third snips it off. Good and evil is all woven in one’s destiny and nobody can escape it, not even the Gods.

The story then goes on as the irony of it all unfolds. It’s not for me to reveal the ‘destiny’ of the plot in this review.

‘Wanted’ is a combination of the best of different movies – the philosophical depth of ‘Fight Club’, the awesomeness of John Woo’s slow-mo-matrix-like directing style and the hard thumping Ramstein-like heavy chugging soundtrack. In fact, the movie has the feel of ‘Nightwatch’ and ‘Daywatch’ that the main actor of these two movies even appeared in ‘Wanted’. As I was reading this review, I realized that both had the same director!

I’ll make a daring and bold statement – if you like watching ‘Daywatch’ and ‘Nightwatch’, you’ll love this movie even more. Watch it and think about what you’ve done lately to fulfill your destiny!