Michael DeZubiria
Emelio Estevez makes his writing and directorial debut in Wisdom, the story of a guy named John Wisdom who finds himself in sort of an early life crisis, I guess. Barely entering the real world, he is coming to realize that life is harder than he has been brought up to believe, and he becomes convinced that all this stuff he's been hearing all his life about how he can be anything he wants is not really true, and so he sets out to do what any rational person would do in such a situation. He embarks on a dizzyingly adventurous life of crime and the freedom of the open road. All can only end happily for everyone involved.But rather than become your typical bank robber, Wisdom, after brainstorming at length about the type of criminal that he aspires to be, decides he's going to be a criminal FOR the people. No one can be hurt by his crimes except for big evil corporations and, more specifically, greedy banks. Wisdom believes that he has been dealt an unfair hand in the game of life, and sitting in a bus station in the early part of his wandering, he sees a commercial that convinces him that this he's not the only one. Millions of hard working Americans work themselves to the bone for their entire lives, only to have everything taken away in a flash by the banks when they should be ready to retire in comfort and happiness. And as Brig. Gen. Francis X. Hummel said in The Rock, the situation is unacceptable.Hence we have an understandable concern about a truly troublesome situation of many people in America, but it's a weak premise for the rest of the movie, possibly because 24 year old Estevez, as Wisdom, looks like he's 16 years old in the entire movie. Granted, his character is not meant to be much older than that, but there is a definite element of juvenile grandiose fantasy that renders much of the movie into something of a high school kid's dream of fame and a life of righteous crime. Demi Moore, also 24 years old, plays the equally high school-ish love interest, oddly more ready to leave her boyfriend when he's in a persistent bad mood than she is when he runs out of a bank with a gun and jumps in her car and tells her to step on it with no warning or hesitation. The two ultimately become sort of a mesh of Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood, Mickey and Mallory, etc., as they cross the country holding up banks, but only for the purpose of burning lots of mortgage records, thereby erasing massive amounts of working class debt. Evidently mortgage companies and banks hold only a single solitary copy of debt records, and clearly there can't have been any computerized records, this is 1986 after all. Computers were like the size of Volkswagens back then, weren't they? So here are a few reasons that the movie is just about unwatchable. First, there is the acting. I'll just specify the scene where Wisdom finally is able to talk to his parents after being on the run for several days. Very emotional, and quite possibly the least bearable scene in the film. Just stop, Emilio. This, as Roger Ebert might say, is a scene meant to be cut up and made into ukulele picks for the poor. Second, there's the pursuit. The FBI is chasing them, and at one point the head FBI agent worriedly hopes that they can get to them before they get to a certain bank. Would it not be prudent to send some agents straight to that bank to meet them? Thirdly, there's the simplicity of it all. Americans in debt, Wisdom comes in armed with an Uzi to save the day. Please. The last line in the film, more than any other line in any other movie I've ever seen, completely cancels itself out. It literally would have made no difference if the final line had been 'Why did we even make this movie?'(spoilers) You can kind of track the progression of the writing, the ideas changing and evolving as the story develops. First there's the young kid trying to make some sense out of what he has to work with in his life, then the determined young man out to help his fellow man, then the Robin Hood, sequence, then Bonnie and Clyde after they tarnish their consciences, then the high speed pursuit as the police close in on them despite their own incompetence. The car chase is a great scene, it's a surprisingly well-made car chase for such a weak film, but the build up is heavily flawed. The scene where Demi kills the sheriff is a real forehead slapper. On the run and with their faces plastered all over the TV and newspapers, Karen (Moore) walks into a convenience store and is shocked to find the sheriff walking in. So what does she do? She walks toward the door, stops behind him, and stares at him like a frightened deer, motionless until he can gradually recognize her. At one point, he even asks her, 'Are you okay, miss?' Sure, she was terrified, but I get so tired of scenes where you're sitting there yelling at the screen because all she has to do is keep walking. Had she just walked out, chances are the sheriff wouldn't have thought twice about it, and just kept right on living. But no, she had to pull out her gun and shoot him, and then jump into the car with her boyfriend so they can zoom down the highway to their deaths.Sadly, once that car chase is over, it's all downhill. You can't really root for Wisdom to run around killing people, because he's not supposed to be a bad guy and is definitely not supposed to be a killer. Like his choices in life, he was supposed to have been DRIVEN to it by society. He had no choice, right? So why not return fire when they shoot Karen near the end of the film after they try to steal the Mustang? That jerk shot your girlfriend out of a helicopter, man! Shoot it down! Here's my theory – Estevez HAD to have known that his audience was going to want him to return fire, the FBI agent had long since been established as an antagonist. I'm sure Emilio wanted to put that in the script as well, a great way for them both to go out in a glorious hail of bullets, he probably just didn't have the budget to blow up a helicopter. So we get this scene in the football stadium. Why the cops went there in the first place I have no idea.The movie knows what it wants to do and, thematically, it sets about to do it in a straight line. Unfortunately the characters change constantly, each one making ridiculous decisions out of the blue or to support the ridiculous decisions of the other ones, gradually changing into different people as a life of crime can do, but doing so through a series of wholly unbelievable scenes and events. And besides that, Demi had yet to make much of an impression, which surely must have worried her since she has a 10th grade education and doesn't have a lot to fall back on besides acting, and let's face it, Emilio had a rough introduction to writing and directing. Evidently he learned a lot of lessons from this movie before coming back in spectacular form in 1990.
