Film LXXII

Because I won't have time until Thursday...

LXXII: Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008)

It wasn't.

Edit: It's rare I agree with Peter Bradshaw but:

"None of the violence and the action have a fraction of the beady-eyed intensity with which the director invests the moment where Wes quits his job and tells his boss to shove it. Because his boss is a fat ugly woman. This horrible bitch is always snapping at him and she gets her comeuppance in a big way, her obesity being a clear sign that she's asking to be brought low and laughed at. Her existence is briefly reprised at the end of the film, when one of Wes's bullets whistles through the doughnut she's gobbling.

"I have to say I don't think I've seen a film recently which expresses hatred of women quite so openly, and fervently, as this one. In a way, Wes's boss is the most vivid female character in the film, more powerfully and pointedly conceived than the others: more than Wes's horrible, duplicitous girlfriend, who gets to be humiliated by seeing Wes kissing Fox and more than Fox herself, who is basically an honorary male. This is a film where womankind is represented by irrelevant sleek babes and obese comic foils, an ugly whorehouse aesthetic which really does sock over its contempt for femaleness very, very powerfully indeed.