MOST WANTED, Starring Keenen Ivory Wayans, Jon Voight. Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans. Category IIB. Opens February 12 at UA Queensway, UA Times Square, UA Sha Tin, UA Whampoa, UA Bonds, GV Mongkok, Pearl, Kwai Fong Broadway, Yuen Long Broadway.
This straight-ahead actioner would have been a lame duck even if it had gone straight to video. On the big screen its many shortcomings, which range from script credibility to dialogue delivery, are simply magnified.
In fact, the film's ham-fisted execution almost, but not quite, puts it in the so bad it's enjoyable category.
Most Wanted sells itself as a thriller, but the most mysterious thing about it is how the script got past development in the first place. That, and how it managed to attract a star of the calibre of John Voight.
The movie is a pet project of Keenen Ivory Wayans, the US television comedy star who's probably best known outside of America for the cheery black exploitation spoof I'm Gonna Get You Sucka. Wayans starred in, wrote and produced Wanted, which, like most pet projects, suffers from one man doing too much with too little imagination.
The film starts off a bit like The Dirty Dozen, with Wayans being sprung from death row on the condition that he joins an elite bunch of killers. The job is to assassinate a heinous industrialist who is trading in bio-tech weapons.