Keenen Ivory Wayans is one of the
creators of TV's usually funny, frequently intelligent, and
sometimes inspired In Living Color and host of his own
talk show. That apparently was not enough. Now there is Most
Wanted, a big-screen effort written, produced, and starring
Keenen Ivory Wayans. Even by Hollywood standards, this is a foray
into profound megalomania. Wayans should -- as one of the deeply
irreverent film critics in a recurring segment of In Living
Color might say -- curb his hubris.
The storyline begins implausibly and
gets worse, with Wayans playing Marine Sgt. James Dunn, a wrongly
imprisoned sharpshooter sentenced to execution. A covert military
team frees him and offers him the alternative of carrying out an
assassination, but another assassination mysteriously occurs in
close proximity to, and just before, Dunn carries out his
assignment, and he becomes the prey in a chase involving every
agency from the local police to the CIA.
It would all be merely silly, and
another $40 million wasted, were it not for the fact that the
film is also a perfect example of the sort of mindless,
irresponsible, sensational hodgepodge that is fodder for ignorant
hysterics, whether they be paranoid militiamen, terrorists in the
making, or Internet-cruising psychotics. After seeing a movie
like Most Wanted, the argument of whether art imitates
life or life imitates art seems a jejune, if not downright
disingenuous, exercise at best.
Wayans, a tall, graceful, good-looking
guy, has always seemed witty and intelligently satirical on the
small screen; the best of In Living Color's sketches
skewer racism with provocative hilarity and take level aim at
sacred cows other comedy formats look past. Perhaps he should
turn some of the cool-eyed objectivity that has enlivened his
television work to a consideration of what this conspicuously
failed "leap" to films has really cost.
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