With news that there may be a sequel to Timur Bekmambetov’s 2008 adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic about the ultra-violent and glamorous side of a league of supervillians, I have to ask: why bother with a sequel at all? Why not a reboot?
The first film was like buying a nice juicy roast chicken to find it’s been stripped completely of the original meat, but with turkey and goose meat glued to the carcass instead.
This Frankenstein’s monster of a film bears very little resemblance to the original comic from which it was supposedly based. Instead of supervillians we get assassins. Instead of random victims, we get the names of targets from a magical loom. The entire structure is radically different. Wanted is in name only.
If this film was was the fictional chicken-thats-really-a-turkey-goose-monster that I’ve described above, one would have probably have reported the filmmakers of the first film to trading standards for false advertising. Wanted was the most bizzare adaptation of any comic – ever.
As much as I despise rebooting films, Wanted could be the biggest and most influential film in its genre to benefit from such a reboot. Bringing Millar’s original vision to the screen would do far more to benefit both the Wanted franchise and the superhero/supervillian genre rather than pave the way for a possibly bland sequel to a film that, although I found reasonably enjoyable, wasn’t a patch on the comic (which I own and love).