A Little Validation for Your Feelings

This sums up how I felt about the trailer for "Wanted" pretty perfectly.

Angelina Jolie Is Very Believable As Angelina Jolie

(Courtesy of The Hater blog on AV Club)
posted by: Amelie Gillette

April 23, 2008 - 11:37am

In the trailer for Wanted, the following things take place:

--Someone uses a gun that bends like a bendy straw

--Bullets swerve in mid-air

--A passenger is scooped into a speeding car, instead of struck by it.

--The "fraternity" of the world's most secret assassins meets in a gigantic, decidedly non-secret castle.

--A guy is literally cut into a million, perfectly cubed pieces when he bursts through a glass window

But despite all of these things, the most unbelievable, highly ridiculous, patently absurd thing about Wanted is that Angelina Jolie is supposed to be playing an assassin, and not Angelina Jolie.

You can continue reading Amelie's take here as well as watch the trailer for yourself. Personally, I'm just going to sit here and continue to feel relieved that I'm not the only one who's started seeing Angie as incapable of playing anything but herself. Even the other day, I happened to catch Original Sin on Lifetime or Oxygen, one of those (and depressing in of itself), and I thought "Oh, look Angelina's in Cuba!"

People talk ad nauseam about the damage of the paparazzi, the invasion of privacy, "think about the children!" and "there's a war in Iraq too!"- all that. My personal beef can best be summed up by Scarlet Johansson from a magazine interview I read years ago, and this is purely from memory so I apologize for any inaccuracy, which was that she was mostly sorry that the mystery surrounding Hollywood had pretty much dissipated. And it's true- we attribute so much glamour to old Hollywood, Hayworth and Hepburn and Grant, but how much of that is the power of black and white and some soft lighting? The truth is these stars didn't give us much beyond what they granted us on screen. And the result? When we saw Garbo in Grand Hotel, we believed who she purported to be. We got in lost in Hepburn and Tracy's repartee on screen but what if we had watched, knowing full well because of a dogged press that they were having an affair? Something great would've been lost. It would be difficult to separate the couple on screen from the illicit romance they shared in real life.

So, yes, it's hard to buy Angelina Jolie the actress these days. And this character especially seems to be phoned in more than her most- indeed the badass assassin is mostly an anagram of her previous roles. Scramble the backgrounds and we're right back to Lara Croft and Jane Smith, with a little bit of that chick from Hackers thrown in for good measure. It's a shame too because it really isn't her fault. And James McAvoy is seriously cute even if this looks more like a job for Shia.