How Pathetic Has the American Male Become?

I understand it's just a movie, but I went into Wanted expecting a fun Summer movie ride and I walked out depressed at the state of the American male.

Warning, there are spoilers below, so if you want to see two hours of slow-mo bullets piercing heads and the laws of physics being violated, then you may not wish to read further.

Wanted is Matrix without Matrix's heart and soul. There's lots of slow-mo action, some of it quite good but most of it simply ridiculous. In one scene, a car slides sideways, hits a small lateral crack in the pavement, vaults 20 feet over a phalanx of police cars, hits the side of a bus with its wheels, pushes the bus over on its side, and drives off the bus to safety. In another scene, a single bullet pierces the heads of six different people consecutively. Some movies this season are about super heroes, but this one is about super bullets!

I'm not going to complain about the ridiculously unbelievable action sequences in Wanted; instead, I'll complain about what it says about my gender. The movie's about a feckless office worker named Wesley Gibson who lives a miserable life ruled by shrew-like women--his obese boss is a bully and his girlfriend is an unfaithful witch. The flick is one of the most misogynistic movies I can recall in quite some time. (Of course, his one and only buddy is no better--he's screwing Wesley's girlfriend and actually borrows money from our protagonist to buy the condoms to do so.)

Wesley comes to learn that he has special powers and is the son of the world's greatest assassin, which is pretty lucky for the guy since the movie makes clear that working in an office is the equivalent of modern slavery. Stripped of his dignity in the most crude and cartoonish of ways, Wanted makes sure the audience cannot miss how unmanly it is for Wesley to work in a cubicle. As a result, his conversion to an assassin's way of life has less to do with family honor and almost everything to do with the fact the modern male is a wimpy, downtrodden, sterile, powerless being who can really only realize his potential by causing mayhem and death.

I have nothing against fantasies where people escape a burdensome existence for something more exciting (see Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc.), but I do object when the exciting way of life is nothing more than an adrenalin rush from killing others. The writers, sensing they needed to give Wesley some semblance of a conscience, paste a fraudulent and brief scene where he hesitates on his first assassination assignment. Luckily, he quickly learns it's all right to kill other people, and his momentary lapse gives him script license to smile lustily as he mows people down from that point forward.

The men in the audience at my showing seemed to eat it up, and that is what I found depressing. How sad have we males become that we empathize with the powerlessness of an office employee and cheer as the character graduates from puberty to manhood by sending bullets into people.

Maybe I just take things too seriously, but I found Wanted to be more disturbing than entertaining. Perhaps the misogynistic, misanthropic ideas are just in the heads of the film makers, but heaven help us if they've tapped into the psyche of the modern man.