Rating:

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is pathetic loser living a pathetic life. His day to day existence consists of working a miserable job as a desk jockey in a sea of cubicles. After being consistently berated by the boss who hates his guts, he returns home to his skank girlfriend who constantly demeans him while fucking his best friend behind his back. He then goes to bed, only to wake up to do it all over again. Wesley probably echoes a lot of people out there, to varying degrees, living their lives secretly wondering if they shouldn’t be doing something else, yet too afraid to make that first action to break the pattern they are living, or wishing someone or something would intervene and just do it for them. Wesley experiences the latter, while buying his ant-anxiety pills at the local drug store.

He is approached by a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie)who informs him that the father he never knew was a member of a 1000-year-old group of super assassins called The Fraternity. She tells him that his father was just recently murdered by a member of the group who went rogue and is now out to kill Wesley as well.  Obviously, that is a lot to swallow, but Wesley barely has a chance to absorb the information before he is involved in a shootout in the aisles of the store. Fox saves Wesley, whisking him away to The Fraternity hideout via one of the films car chase sequences, where Wesley learns that he has inherited superpowers that his father had, but that they are currently dormant. He, like the rest of the Fraternity members, has the power to control his adrenaline in ways that give him super-human speed and agility, allowing him to pull off mind-bending actions that seem to defy the laws of physics. Wesley must make a choice of returning to his pathetic, yet predictable life or joining this group of assassins, unlock his powers, and ultimately avenge his father’s death.

Wanted is an over-the-top action film directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the man who also brought us the excellent Night Watch and Day Watch movies. The film is based (barely) off a Top Cow comic of the same name, written by Mark Millar. But be warned that if you have read the comics, writers Derek Haas and Michael Brandt made so many major changes adapting the series to the screen, very little of the comic was left intact. This was disappointing as the source material was a very dark story in which the main characters operated with no morals, and could have made Wanted an extremely controversial film. But while this may not be the film fans of the comic were hoping for, it still succeeds as a brainless action movie. Bekmambetov does not disappoint anyone looking forward to his visual flair as Wanted has a plethora of scenes that focus on what is unfocusable. From the flying keys of a keyboard dislodged by the impact of being slammed into someones face, to the slow-motion gun play that includes scenes of projectiles curving through the air or being shot out of the air. You will even follow the impossible path a of a bullet as it traverses through the obstacles of an urban landscape. There are a couple of comic book logic car stunts as vehicles jump, flip and perform the kind of acrobatics usually reserved for kids playing with their Matchbox cars.

For a film that is action heavy and dialog-lite, James McAvoy still does a good job with Wesley, starting convincingly as a shell-shocked, cuckolded man and quickly evolving into a stone-cold, bullet-curving assassin.  Jolie takes the less-is-more approach foregoing a lot of pesky lines but still coming off formidable while gorgeous, using mostly her facial expressions throughout most of the movie. Morgan Freeman, who plays the leader of The Fraternity, Sloan, pretty much plays Morgan Freeman. This is not a bad thing if you are a fan, and he does have a line in the film that had the audience howling with laughter and even repeating it when the lights came up. McAvoy and Jolie both handle the break-neck action scenes very well, no matter how ludicrous these scene can get. Bekmambetov should also be credited for filming some of these scenes so that they never become such a confusing mess that you have a hard time figuring out what in the hell is going on. Along with all of this action is a pretty good body count and more than a bucket full of blood. Most of this blood-letting is reserved for bullet damage inflicted on the assassin’s targets as well as the final showdown that is reminiscent of the lobby scene in The Matrix.

You also have a couple scenes of bullets burrowing out of foreheads, with all the gor spiraling behind it. Wesley’s training involves him having his face turned into a bloody pulp while tied to a chair and getting into knife fights with a man called The Butcher…a man who can use his knives to knock bullets out of the air as easily as someone swatting away flies. Ocverall, some of the bleak commentary, mixed with the gravity-defying, splattery action sequences make Wanted feel like Fight Club mixed with The Matrix. It’s during these scenes, if you are not put off by the absurdity of some of them, that Wanted works pretty well. When the action stops to take a breath, the film’s flaws become a little more visible.

As is usually the case with action films such as this, if you stop and really take a look at the surroundings, the adrenaline rush you may have gotten previously could result in a hard crash from the sheer dumbness of it all. Motivations are not fleshed out and just quickly glanced over and some of the plot devices in the film are admittedly ridiculous, including a Loom of Fate (come one, no one questioned this?) and some third act antics involving rats, but Bekmambetov keeps the pedal of this vehicle mashed into the floor the majority of the time, keeping the movie at such a break-neck speed that all the razzle-dazzle makes these things easy to overlook. There is also the nonchalant way in which collateral damage is handled in the film. While the assassin’s operate under a code that was created to protect the innocent, they do not seem to show any regard towards people killed or injured during their exploits. This is very noticeable in a train derailment scene, in which the innocent people these characters are supposed to be indirectly protecting, are treated worse than the people they are in charge of assassinating, mostly because these innocent people are completely disregarded, ignored by the characters and Timur Bekmambetov himself.

Even with the deviation from the source material, time spent on some of the absurdities would have been better spent dealing with Wesley’s beginning targets as well as the moral dilemma he faces killing people purely because he was told to do so. This would have made for a more satisfying, and believable build-up of watching Wesley get a grip on his powers as he heads towards his ultimate goal of killing the man who murdered his dear, old dad.

But in the end,  Wanted is  the definition of a brainless popcorn flick that brings comic-book actions in a real-world setting instead of vice-versa. It also has the same theme running in it that seems to be running in other films of late, asking the viewer to stop and evaluate their lives and ask themselves if they are truly content with the way things are, or should they be taking the steps to ensure that their lives are as close as possible to the way they think it should be. While the central plot of both the comic and the film are not original, the tried-and-true formula of the average guy becoming something special (see Luke Skywalker, Peter Parker, Neo, etc), the comic was far edgier and the final pages were a nice middle finger to the people reading it. While the film adaptation doesn’t quite have the final sucker punch the comic did and even with the far-fetched plot additions, Bekmambetov and his team keep Wanted hyperkenetic and fun, making Wanted a Summer film I would recommend watching at least once.