Gokuma

Reading “Wanted” is a really interesting experience. Especially if you know the movie - if you bought the book after watching the movie and you expect to re-live the Wesley Gibson’s story, the story of an always stressed-out office worker, a loser with dead-end job who one day finds out he’s to become the world’s best asassin. Well, these are basics, similar in both the book and the movie.

Everything else is completely different.

In the Timur Bekmambetov’s movie we don’t get to see a lot of unusual stuff - everything except for the Gibson’s skills is similar to our world. It’s basically our world, with few supernatural tweaks. The comic book shows the world that’s basically a big lie - its normality is just a cover-up, the result of a world-wide brainwashing, after the war where all the superheroes have been destroyed or killed off – all that’s left are less and more evil supervillains.

Wesley is one of the better ones – yet he’s still not as innocent as Wesley-McAvoy. The comic book Gibson kills, rapes, tortures people because he feels like it – and he’s still someone moderate, there are people (and creatures: because the comic book’s world is not just a world of humans) who are much worse than him. And one day one of the world’s worsts – a supervillain called Rictus – reveals his plot to make the world even worse for “normal” humans. And this is a point when Wesley decides that’s enough and that he’s gonna stop Rictus…

I’m kinda glad I read the Mark Millar’s book after I saw the movie; I was really surprised, that’s true, but the Bekmambetov’s story is so much “nicer” – so much more innocent, it’s like the abridged version of the real “Wanted”. I guess I would be really disappointed if I was the comics’ fan before watching the movie (I think that’s what all the A:TLA’s fan feel while watching the Shamalayan’s movie). But like this, the other way around, it’s fine – and I see a lot of source material that can be developed into the sequels.

…I have some difficulties trying to imagine James playing the actual Wesley Gibson. But - as I said (well, wrote) – the book and the movie are almost two completely different stories…