10 "Awful" Comic Book Movies Worth A Second Chance

9. Wanted

The comic book version of Wanted is about Wesley Gibson, a man raised by a pacifist mother to become a spineless cubicle worker who is abused by everyone in his life, until he discovers his father was actually a supervillain. And now he's been invited to join the Fraternity, an organization of supervillains that secretly rule the world. The film is completely different in just about every way, shape, and form. The first part is still the same, with Wesley being a spineless cubicle rat until approached by Fox. But instead of being supervillains who secretly rule the world, the Fraternity are an order of assassins who get their targets from the Fates. Operating out of a textile mill, they receive their targets from the Loom of Fate, which provides the names of targets through binary code hidden in the fabric. The comic is basically a textbook example of everything that is wrong with modern-day comic books. It's filled with ham-fisted dialogue and so-called "edginess": like characters named F**kwit or Wesley gleefully committing rape (if there's one comic writer who loves rape scenes more than Alan Moore, it's Mark Millar). Like the vast majority of Millar's work, it's the kind of stuff that a maladjusted 14-year-old would consider mature. Throwing all that out in favor of a story about assassins working for the Fates is far more interesting to me, especially when it involves the work of Timur Bekmambetov, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, and the legendary Terence Stamp, all of whom have more talent in their fingernails than Millar has in his entire body.