Here’s a fun game: Try to imagine Angelina Jolie in the “Sex and the City” movie. You know, hanging with Carrie and the girls. Shoe shopping, giggling, brunching. Kind of makes your head hurt, doesn’t it?
Angelina Jolie ‘Wanted’ Gallery
Now picture her playing Tony Stark’s dutiful assistant in “Iron Man.” Or Bruce Banner’s long-suffering love interest in “The Incredible Hulk.” Not much easier, right?
No, Jolie is in a category all her own – and she’s nobody’s best girlfriend. Just in the nick of time, this real-life superhero is here to rescue us from a summer movie season monopolized by testosterone and handbags.
In Timur Bekmambetov’s Matrixy thriller “Wanted,” out Friday, Jolie is in top form: lean, scowling, firing big guns at bad guys – and not exactly taking it easy on the good guy, either.
Watching the film, you get the feeling that Jolie intimidated every male actor around her, and she probably did – as critic Pauline Kael once said of her, “this girl would scare the crap out of Jack Nicholson in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.'”
So why isn’t she getting more lead action roles?
In “Wanted,” Jolie plays Fox, an assassin in a league known as the Fraternity (oh, the symbolism!). Plot-wise, she’s not exactly in the driver’s seat; Fox is charged with shaping James McAvoy’s wimpy office-drone character into the hero he’ll eventually become. It’s a plum role, but not a starring one.
The on-set relationship between Jolie and McAvoy, says Bekmambetov, actually ended up mirroring what took place in the script. Jolie, the seasoned action vet, took McAvoy, the pasty Brit, under her wing. “Angelina was his mentor, she helped him,” Bekmambetov says. “She was the Hollywood person, and his journey was basically the journey of his character.”
Sharing the spotlight has, so far, been the price Jolie’s had to pay for building up her cred as a viable action-movie player. “That’s the nature of her butt-kicking characters,” says Tom O’Neil, columnist for the film site TheEnvelope.com. “You can’t think of another female star who’s upstaging her, but it still seems like girls have to take a secondary role.”
With the notable exception of 2001’s “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and its sequel, every thriller in which Jolie’s appeared – her top-grosser “Mr. And Mrs. Smith,” as well as “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” “Taking Lives,” “The Bone Collector,” “Gone in Sixty Seconds” – has seen her taking a back seat to, or at least co-starring with, a male heavy hitter.
Is it that directors think she can’t hold her own in a lead role? Because let us be, well, far from the first to argue that yes, she can. She’s one of the most famous faces in the world. She regularly tops drooling men’s-magazine lists of sexiest celebs alive. Last month, a poll of bikers rated her “Tomb Raider” motorcycle-chase scene “best two-wheeled movie moment of all time.” (Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape” came in second.)
She’s also proven her worth as a box-office draw. “The ‘Tomb Raider’ movies made her a superstar,” says O’Neil. “The first one made $131 million, and the second was $65 million. It didn’t make as much as the first, but it didn’t disappoint.”
Simon West, who directed Jolie in the first “Tomb Raider,” is scratching his head at the lack of Lara-like roles for Jolie. Back when he cast her in his adaptation of the popular video game, it seemed like a no-brainer to hang the success of a movie on her trim frame.
“At the time, I remember thinking, ‘How could it not work?'” he says. “The girls want to go see it because she’s a great role model and they can project themselves. The guys want to see it because it’s great to watch Angelina Jolie on the big screen. So I never had any qualms about it – but everyone seemed to find it very unusual.”
What’s weirder, he points out, is that “it still seems to be unusual.”
It’s a curious thing, because the Cult of Angelina (OK, Brangelina, if you want, but let’s be honest – Brad is kind of an afterthought) has never been stronger. The fever-pitch of speculation about when and where she’ll give birth to her twin girls has spawned new levels of paparazzi insanity.
But, despite her burgeoning brood, Jolie always plays as hard as the guys when she gets on the set. “She seems to be this frail, slender, delicate creature when she’s strolling down the red carpet,” says O’Neil, “and then becomes the ultimate symbol of female empowerment in these films.”
And cinematic female empowerment – blame it on “Thelma and Louise” – often equals firepower.
“She likes guns,” Bekmambetov says. “And she likes to be perfect. It’s not easy to work with her, because she’s a perfectionist. She makes everything move faster, better. She has a lot of ideas.”
One of Jolie’s ideas for “Wanted” was, ironically, cutting down on her own lines to make her character even scarier. “It wasn’t that I thought [the lines] were bad,” she told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “I just really felt like [Fox] didn’t talk very much.”
“It was a very smart idea,” says Bekmambetov. “In the movie, she’s a killer – she has to kill, not talk. And that’s what made this character so unique. She creates mystery around her. It’s a war, and she’s a warrior.”
Credit “Tomb Raider” director West for kick-starting Jolie’s warrior side. She did most of her own stunts for that film, sometimes to a fault: “She had this total lack of fear,” he says. “A couple of times I had to remind her that she wasn’t the character, and that she had to put on the safety cable, because if she fell it would really hurt.”
Is it so bad, though, to have one actress out there who believes she’s an invincible action hero? The only other female hero character in the genre this summer, Selma Blair’s Liz Sherman in “Hellboy 2” (out next month), reportedly spends most of her time knocked up – and if there’s one thing we’ve had plenty of in the past year of movies, it’s pregnant women.
No, we strongly prefer Jolie, who kicks butt onscreen and plays mama off-screen. As with everything else in her life, she’s insisted on doing it to the extreme – six kids? really? – but so far, motherhood doesn’t seem to be slowing her down. Jolie still works tirelessly as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. Last week, she appeared in a PSA for World Refugee Day, and her page on the UN’s site currently lists more than 20 field missions since her appointment in 2001, including trips to Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
And, OK, it might seem like she’s mixing her messages a little – stumping for the rights of refugees from war-torn countries one week, wielding enormous semiautomatic weapons on the big screen the next. But we say: Woman’s got a right to be contradictory. We need her gunslinging bravado in the movies. After all, nongirly girls need role models, too.
“She had a very tough persona around her, and a lot of girls came to [my] movie because of that,” says West. “She has a great female following. If there were more women like her, maybe there would be more films like that.”