Wanted

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a sniveling coward of an office worker, who shares his thoughts with us the viewer about how much he hates his office job but then cowers and does what he is told by the vile boss when push comes to shove. His home life is little better with his girlfriend cheating with his best friend. He suffers from panic attacks and generally hates his miserable life. So true to classic male fantasy form he meets the beautifully sexy and dangerous Fox (Angelina Jolie) who informs him he has the makings of an assassin. At first he balks at such but then finding new found courage in this he breaks free from his wretched life.

After a mind-numbing training montage, sniveling coward Wesley transforms into badass...well not really but certainly less sniveling...assassin Wesley. He teams up on occasion with Fox and takes orders from stately and sage (Morgan Freeman) who literally gets orders by reading binary code from a loom of fates (no, seriously). Wesley is needed because he is the only one who can face a rogue agent who is killing the league of assassins one by one. I found the plot so bizarre and confusing that I went and did a little research on the source material.

Based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar and JG Jones , Wanted was about a world in which all the super villains teamed together and through a secret cabal run the world and all the heroes now think they are everyday nobodies. In this story Wesley discovers he is the son of one of these villains and has powers. And you know what by comparison that makes a lot more sense than this movie. It explains why he could do the things he does such as leap long distances and recover from wounds faster. Its actually coherent enough that I can't figure out why they went for the thousand year old secret society of weaver assassins who get orders from a magical loom that understood binary a millennium before it came into use.

Having seen Bekmambetov's earlier Russian films Night Watch and Day Watch I knew he had a masterful talent for lots of cool looking stuff that made almost no coherent sense. Actually I think he is getting crazier with each film. This one is loaded with over-stylized action sequences with bullet time and absurd ideas like curving bullets (more believable if he was a super villain, sadly in this version he is not). But perhaps the film is saved from abysmal oblivion by its acting? Not really.

Sure Freeman and Jolie play there characters to the extreme of their crudely sketched limits but who cares. I've seen these characters a thousand times by now. Jolie is little more than the role she has played in Mr. and Mrs. Smith or the Tomb Raider franchise. Freeman plays that same sage-like character he always plays no different than any other time he has played a villain. And frankly both bored me endlessly. McAvoy does reasonably well with his part as the wimpy Wesley but has a far harder time convincing me he is an action hero bad ass.

Actually watching this film made me think back to last year's disaster of an action film Shoot 'Em Up and had me thinking that maybe that was actually more clever than I gave it credit for. In my memory it almost seems like it was mocking directly the direction that action films have gone today. Bekmambetov seems to think the flashier the sequences and the faster he moves the camera, the better the movie will be. This is not the case.