Wanted: Dead Or Alive, But Preferably Alive

A Trip To The Arcade And The Unfortunate Incident Of The Pepsi Can

Now, I'm not a squeamish person by nature. I watched Robocop 2 at a very impressionable age and you know the scene where Cain has been killed and his brain and spinal cord are in a jar? My dad walks in at this point and, showing pretty much the only piece of fatherly concern he will ever show asks me if I should be watching this. Bear in mind he was the one who rented the video for me. If memory serves, and it usually does given my almost autistic knack for date retention, I would have been ten.

But go forward a few years and I get Terminator 2 for my thirteenth birthday. It sits on the shelf for a few weeks before I watch it. Why? It's not uncommon now for me to have movies and TV shows on DVD for months if not years before I finally get round to watching them. But I have thousands of DVD's now. Back then I maybe had twenty videos. And I didn't have a video in my room. The simple fact of the matter is that I was scared.

What?

Yes, I was scared. I was faintly traumatised by the sex scene in the first Terminator film and I imagined that T2 might be even more traumatic (there's a pseudo-rape scene in John Boorman's Excalibur that shook me so badly that it's only been since university that I've actually been able to sit and watch the film without suffering from palpitations - but in that case, I was expecting a nice jolly film about King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake, the adverts for it on Channel 4 didn't mention anything about sex). But I watched it eventually and loved it. Except for one bit.

It's at the shopping mall, near the start of the film. The two Terminators have just met, converging on little Eddie Furlong and they're out the back of some arcade, your generic corridor. And there's this bloke there, telling them that it's for staff only or some such shit. And then the Terminators just open fire on each other. The T-1000 kills this poor guy who was just standing there. I remember it vividly, because he's holding a can of Pepsi and that gets a few bullets through it as well. And this scene really freaked me out. Honestly. I'm thirteen years old and sitting there getting really worked up by the fact that this guy, who, let's face it was just some lame-ass arcade worker, probably some student looking for a bit of extra cash, has been killed.

And the worst thing? No one even mentions him. As far as I can remember, even when the cops come to see Sarah at the nuthouse and tell her that Arnold has gone on the rampage again, they don't say, "Oh, and he killed this poor schmuck." He's not even a footnote in the history of Skynet.

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

And so, yeah, that disturbed me. A couple of years later and there was I watching Total Recall, that classic Arnold film (yes, him again, you really can't be a fan of sf cinema and not be at least passingly intimate with the Governer of California's resume - The Terminator, Total Recall, The 6th Day, True Lies, The Running Man, Predator - he's in half of the classic SF movies of the eighties and nineties, and some of the duffers as well). And there's a scene when the mighty Michael Ironside is chasing the big lug. They catch him on an escaltor and just open fire. Fair enough, they are bad guys. But the bloke in front of Arnie cops the brunt of it. Here's another poor schmuck, this one just out doing a bit of shopping and what does he get? A chestful of bullets. To make matters worse, Arnie uses the poor fucker as a human shield (alright, the dude is dead by this point, but come on, have some fucking respect). And again, this disturbs me. I start having visions of going to the Metro Centre and getting gunned down simply because I'm between the bad guy and the good guy.

So why doesit bother me so much? I mean, I can quite happily watch movies like You Only Live Twice where hundred of people get gunned down, poisoned, and generally made dead. Or Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman chops people up in a frenzy of limb-detaching action.

The main difference is, I think, that those examples I have cited above are all about people taking action. It's one thing for a soldier - even a goodie - to be gunned down (I've never felt much sympathy for Donald Sutherland at the end of The Dirty Dozen, f'rinstance) but it's an entirely different thing for an innocent person, one who is entirely peripheral to the plot to have the same punishment meted out to them.

What If I Told You Bullets Didn't Fly Straight?
(Spoilers For Wanted)

And it's this empathy on my part which mars the otherwise very entertaining film, Wanted. Based on Mark "God" Millar's comic (I refuse to pander to the intellectual's use of the phrase 'graphic novel' - it's a fucking comic and that is something to be celebrated) and directed by the Russian dude who made Night Watch and Day Watch (an example of two DVD's in my collection that I have owned for months and still havent got round to watching yet), it's the story of a dick who works in an office who suddenly finds out that he's actually a superhero. Not only that, but his dad was a superhero who worked for a bunch of assassins and he has just been killed. So it's a story of revenge. Only his dad isn't dead, the bunch of assassins have hired him to kill his dad because he's the best assassin ever and his son is the only person he won't kill.

So far so good. It's a fairly standard plot (although I have to admit that I didn't see the plot twist about Wesley's dad being the one he's been sent to kill coming) but told with a great deal of visual panache and style. You can forgive a movie a lot when it looks this good, and since it's not too shabby to start off with, well, we're easily into 4 star territory.

But one scene sticks in my craw. Between them, Wesley, Wesley's dad and Angelina Jolie manage to derail a train. And not a freight train or a nearly empty train, but a packed to the gills passenger train. And pretty much everyone on the train dies, apart from our hero. There's a couple of scenes which make it clear that most of the other people have died in the crash. A nd it leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth. Sure, it's a film about an assassin, you expect people to bite the bullet (literally in some cases) but such wholesale slaughter, and such unnecessary slaughter sits ill with the tone of the film. It reminds me of something Martin Campbell said on the GoldenEye commentary, that it was alright for Bond to crush cars and stuff when he was in the tank, as long as you saw the people were alright afterwards.

If the deaths of all those people had a dramatic point at its foundation, then I might be able to get away with it. As it is, it's an annoying moral niggle (and yes, before you say anything, I know none of it's real and no one actually died, but they went to the effort of showing us all the people on the train and then killing them purely to provide an admittedly spectacular set-piece) that will annoy me and will continue to annoy me even after I have bought the Blu-ray, because, after all, it's fifteen years since T2 and that poor schmoe in the corridor still tugs at my heartstrings.

Peace out.