If this looks like the kind of movie you'd like, then you're in luck, it delivers.

If it doesn't look like anything you'd ever like, then you probably want to buy a copy of The Women, a movie so dangerously vacuous it carries a  Black Box Warning for Suicidality in Children and Adolescents.  It's the movie Mick Jagger would produce if he he simultaneously hit male menopause and a truckload of opaku dung and then got down to producing, which, believe it or not, is almost exactly what happened, except that it wasn't male menopause.





The best thing that can happen to you while watching The Women is cataracts.



AREN'T YOU BEING JUST A TAD JUDGMENTAL?






No.




SO WHY IS WANTED SO GOOD?  IS ANGELINA JOLIE NAKED IN IT?

Well, no, not really.  There's a brief shot of her from the back getting out of a bathtub, but she is so heavily tattooed that she looks like Venom got her.




WHAT?

Hey, if you don't like the reference go back to The Women.

SO WHAT MAKES THIS MOVIE SO GOOD?

I didn't say it was good, I said it was GREAT.  It contains all the elements a pathologically narcissistic and emasculated generation of men need to make themselves feel good again, without marijuana OR facebook.  Let's review:


1. Subtext:  "You are special."

By "subtext," I of course mean "subtitle."  While to the great unwashed it appears that you are a lowly account manager in a cubicle with a cheating girlfriend and no self-respect, in fact you are much, much more than that, like, for example, a mystical assassin with the ability to shoot curveball bullets.

Importantly, your specialness comes not from effort, work, emotion, intellect, perseverance, or concentration, but from just being you-- in this case, being from the lineage of a 1000 years of special people.  All you had to do is get born!  Thanks feudalism!


2.  Campbell/Lucas mythology of the heroic son unaware of his special lineage

You know how your Dad sucks?  Well, he's not really your Dad.   Your real Dad was a great hero, not an HVAC repairman, didn't your mother tell you?  His sword is out back under a rock. 

In this movie, he was a child when his Dad left (to be a mystical assassin) but, keeping to the mythology, was closely but secretly monitoring his son's development (in this case by moving in across the street and buying a telescope.)

3.  Genetics is an untapped endless reservoir of possibility.

You know how you suck?  Turns out it's genetic, but don't Mapquest cyanide plants just yet.  Once you unlock your genes, you'll be able to do almost anything, including but not limited to shooting curveball bullets and slowing down time.  I know, it's far in the future.  But until then you can keep yourself from a suicide/pregnancy pact by remaining optimistic: the best scientists in the secret labs of Asia are working on it.  In the meantime, why not test out your awesomeness by wrestling pumas?

4.  Hot woman with amazing special talents and abilities chooses you.

Awesome.  The Fifth Element, Alias, Ultraviolet, Underworld, Resident Evil-- all these movies represent the demasculinization of a decade of twenty-somethings, but lacked the most important element: you.  This was fixed with Wanted.  Angelina Jolie has all the necessary special powers and abilities, yet she chose you.




Back in the day-- e.g. the six thousand years preceding 1992-- the man had to earn the girl's interest/love/vagina by doing something extraordinary, or at least trying to be extraordinary, or at least being a good person, or at least paying her.  Now, thanks to a lifetime of Captain Crunch, Coldplay,  and institutionalized narcissism, a man can hope that a woman with special powers will want him precisely because these special powers allow her to see how awesome he really is.  Not what he is now, of course, but, you know, what he really is.   You know.  Look past the XBox, you damn bitch. 

Key point: even if he doesn't ultimately live up to his potential, he still got to make out with her.  Nice!

5. You get to kill people.

Awesome, again.  You know, back in the day (see above) all special abilities were to be used for saving people, and killing was always the last resort, and only to be done under the specific direction of John Woo or one of the remaining Wachowski Brothers.  As the Bible teaches us, it's not murder if you're doing a back flip.

If a man doth close both eyes, and raise both guns, so does his aim grow more true.-- Galat 25:3


But in this movie, killing is the point.  Never mind that there's no evidence that the targets are actually bad people-- that's a decision that Fate makes.  Not metaphorically, I mean literally Fate makes it, and it lets you know by sending you a message in binary code written by a... magic loom.  Look, if Angelina Jolie is going to like you, some people are going to need to die to balance out the universe.
 

6. Hot chick who saves you also kills people.




Madonna, whore and death instinct, all in high def!  Thanks Freud!


7.  Mystical manmade machines.

If your iPhone suddenly sends you a message in a binary code that says you need to kill John Smith, you're going to think back if you took your Zyprexa.  Why?  Because no one tells an iPhone owner what to do except Steve Jobs, got it?

But if something with no technology in it at all-- say, a loom-- tells you you need to kill John Smith, you have no choice but to pull up your pants and get your Sig Sauer.  It's totally logical that God can influence a loom-- been doing that since Arachne-- but clearly He's too old to understand all that new fangled technology.  The last time He did was in Stephen King's Processor of the Gods, which, if I'm not mistaken, was an IBM PC.  Look, he's writing out the Book Of Names by hand.

What does it say about our time when we are more in awe of mechanical objects then we are of technology that uses quantum mechanics to operate?

8.  You get to yell "FACE" to your ex-girlfriend.

I did have one question.  If Wesley is such a loser before he learns of his specialness,  how did he manage to get this girl as a girlfriend in the first place?

  


I'd like to see that movie, please.

That aside-- and maybe I'm different-- but if I was able to bend space and time at will, and I learned I was the first lieutenant of Fate itself, and it was my responsibility to emotionlessly execute specific human beings in order to restore balance to the universe, then obviously I'm definitely going to want to find my ex-girlfriend and show her what she missed out on, right? Why else even have those powers?  Does that make me a bad person?


9. Breaking the Fourth Wall.  

Nothing in a movie speaks to a viewer more than actually speaking to a viewer, and that's what this movie does. As it ends, Wesley looks up from his rifle scope, turns to the camera and asks, "This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?"   Well?   "Not killing people" is, of course, a loser's answer, so don't pick it.  Correct answers include, "waiting for my powers to kick in" and "not learning jujitsu because I'll be handed those skills all at once when they are necessary" and "waiting for Angelina to swing buy with a pizza" and "masturbating."