Film Reviews: 'Wanted' and 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 4:49 PM - 0 Comments

Summertime. The living is easy and the popcorn is high. And the time is right for . . . intelligent design? That’s just my lazy way of introducing two unrelated movies about cult-like crazies who harbour some preposterous conspiracy theories. Neither movie makes much sense. But in the case of Wanted, an action blockbuster starring Angelina Jolie as an über-assassin working for a mystical fraternity, who cares? It’s a wild ride, and Angelina looks and behaves like the scandalous bad girl we want her to be despite all those children and all that charity work. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a documentary polemic arguing that believers in intelligent design (i.e. creationists) are being persecuted by “Big Science” and that theories of Darwinian evolution helped spawn Hitler and the Holocaust. There’s not much action in Expelled, but it made me want to throw things at the screen.

Wanted

Judging by the poster and the trailer, you’d be inclined to think of this as the new Angelina Jolie movie. But as it turns out, Wanted is more like the new James McAvoy movie. The plucky star of Atonement and The Last King of Scotland stars as the story’s protagonist, a downtrodden white-collar weakling named Wesley who is rescued from his nowhere job in an office cubicle and recruited into a secret fraternity of assassins. But hey, you could also call it a Timur Bekmambetov movie. . . Timur who? Continue…