Wanted - 2008

Minor Spoilers

On DVD/Bluray

Stars: James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie

Take Fight Club, mix in the Matrix, throw in a little bit of any John Woo film and you'll pretty much get the gist of Wanted. Wanted is a visual tour de force - just kidding, I'll try to avoid the cheese ball critic cliches. Nonetheless the film is visually intriguing and never dull, though it checks in reality at the door. The characters manage to shoot the wings off of flies, bend the trajectory of bullets, slow time, use rats as bombs, and leap fifty yards at a single bound. Oh, and there's that little thing where they receive their instructions from a weaving loom. No joke. A loom. So how could such a ridiculous concept merit a large budget and an audience? Well for starters, take it's actors. As if McAvoy and Jolie weren't enough to draw you in, Morgan Freeman is enough to scrounge up some hope that the film actually has some story meat on it's bones as well as some acting chops. McAvoy stars as a pathetic everyman. You and me. The people who cram into cubicles day by day, put up with ridiculous management and wish for more in their lives, as well as fantasizing about putting some coworkers and bosses in their respective places (Fight Club, anyone?). He is soon drawn into a different state of existence as the world's greatest assassins train him to be as one of their own, for reasons I won't discuss here. Complete with a training montage, he quickly realizes his inner potential and commences to run around the city a killin' with glee. The film has the usual action movie conventions - freakin' shakier than hell camera at times, quick cuts, extremely loud handguns - but also features some pretty spectacular shots and sequences that though unbelievable, manage to fit well into the context of the story and loose rules of physics this movie world presents. The movie truly has some interesting plot twists which genuinely surprised me, though a smarter viewer may be able to see them coming if they watch closely. All of these elements account for a pretty damn good action movie, though I wouldn't recommend it for the squeamish or lovers of small rodents. Jolie is more or less the same one dimensional tough girl that we've seen before in Tomb Raider and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but serves well as extra eye candy to a film that's overblown with it. Freeman doesn't offer much that's different either, taking on the role of the sage old likable guy we've seen in The Dark Knight and Seven, though he does manage to be a bit more foul mouthed and funny at the right moments. McAvoy is great in the lead role. He's an admittedly squirming weiner at the beginning of the film, and a bit of a bad ass at the end. We've seen this formula many times before (the Matrix, Spider-Man) but his metamorphosis is entertaining and hilarious the whole way through. The phrase "I'm sorry" will to me never be the same. All in all, this will never approach "classic" territory in the action genre like Raiders of the Lost Ark or the first Matrix, simply because the movie never necessarily breaks new ground. That reasoning aside, the movie is creative and enjoyable enough (thanks largely in part to it's graphic novel creator Mark Millar) that repeated viewing won't diminish it for quite some time and earned it a place on my "one of the better surprise movies of the summer" list. As I'm kind of torn between the petty things I didn't like about the movie and the elements I really enjoyed, this one gets two grades. Hey, my blog, my rules -

Ron J.

B+/A-