WANTED MAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Wanted Man, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

Wanted Man is an unfortunate sort of bad but well-meaning movie. Part of its failure, though, comes from its good intentions, which are famously proverbial pavement. Often, they're less likely to form a road to hell than to cobble together a road toward the bare minimum of human understanding and compassion.

In this case, it's the path of the main character of co-writer/director/star Dolph Lundgren's movie. He's an old-fashioned cop in some small California city near the border between the United States and Mexico. His older attitudes are of prejudice against anyone from Mexico or with a Mexican background, and his older ways include beating an undocumented immigrant during a traffic stop. Lundrgen's Johansen gets in some trouble for that, since someone recorded the assault with a cellphone—yet not too much trouble, which is mostly so that the plot can happen but might accidentally say more than the screenwriters intended.

That screenplay, written by the director/star with Hank Hughes and Michael Worth, lays it on pretty thick in the first act. Johansen and his cop buddies, either active or retired, hang out a strip club after the protagonist's public scolding at a press conference, downing drinks and complaining about how much the country and society have changed since their glory days in the 1980s. The script gives Johansen and his pals (played by Kelsey Grammer, Michael Paré, and Aaron McPherson) a bunch of political buzzwords to shoot down and reactionary ideas to embrace.

Far more interesting than such blatant and clumsy characterization is Lundgren more or less embracing his current self as a remnant of a bygone era. The actor, who's currently in his late 60s, was one of the regular action movie stars of the '80s and '90s, of course, so what's he to do now? It's a simple fact of life that no one can be young forever, and Lundgren takes that heart with this character.

Yes, he's introduced doing a lot of exercises to maintain his still-hulking frame, but to everyone except his closest friends around him, Johansen is an old-timer who should have retired years ago. The guy even has a bum ankle in need of surgery, so the movie immediately establishes a string of limitations for this guy existing in the modern world.

The biggest limitation for this story, obviously, becomes his prejudices, which are repeatedly challenged when Johansen's boss (played by Roger Cross) gives his disgraced underling an ultimatum. Either Johansen goes to Mexico to retrieve a couple of witnesses to a recent crime, involving the killings of drug smugglers and undercover DEA agents who were building a case against them, or he's fired, loses his pension, and faces possible prosecution for the beating. He selects the former, although his apparent hatred of everything associated with Mexico makes it difficult choice.

The rest of the plot is wholly routine. Johansen and one of the witnesses, an undocumented migrant and sex worker named Rosa (Christina Villa), survive an ambush by local Mexican police, hired by a cartel to kill the witnesses. The American cop is shot in the attack, and Rosa brings him to her cop brother's home to recuperate.

Before the inevitable action erupts, Johansen learns that not all people from Mexico are as bad as he once assumed, while some Americans might be even worse than his worst beliefs about Mexican locals and immigrants. That's the extent and end of the character's evolution, and it's difficult to tell if screenwriters are too caught up in the rest of the plot to flesh out anything else about the character or if they believe that's some significant revelation to impart upon an audience.

Either way, it doesn't add up to much, and neither does the interrupting action, which includes a fairly well-staged shootout in and around house, as well as a climactic showdown with the real villains, whose identities are thoroughly obvious as soon as the movie's thematic point is made clear. The mystery isn't much of one as soon as those characters appear on screen, either. In fact, every plot beat is predictable, really.

What's most frustrating, though, is how little the movie has to say about its central point. Wanted Man literally refuses to say anything at the end, skipping over a big speech in favor of giving the story a final note that's such a cliché—and so unlikely under the specific circumstances—we start to wonder if Lundgren hasn't realized the '80s ended over 30 years ago.

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