Wanted

At the beginning of Wanted, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy from Atonement), is a meek office cubical drone who seems to have come accustomed to being walked on. His boss thinks he's pathetic, his girlfriend doesn't respect him, and is even having a very open affair with his best friend at work. Wesley's dad walked out on his family when he was a baby, so he has no idea that his father was actually an assassin for a top secret thousand-year-old agency known as The Fraternity, or that his father was recently killed in a shootout by a rogue member named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Now that Cross is apparently gunning for Wesley, our hero finds himself forcefully pulled into the secret underground world his father once inhabited. He meets a mysterious woman and fellow Fraternity agent named Fox (Angelina Jolie), who saves his life and introduces him to the rest of the team. They are led by the wise and sagely Sloan (played by the ever wise and sagely Morgan Freeman), and offer Wesley the choice of either learning their ways and turning his life around so that he can avenge his father's death, or remain an office drone and continue living a life out of his control.

This is the set up for a fairly routine action film that answers the question nobody asked - What would happen if the guys from Office Space somehow found themselves in The Matrix? Wanted is a movie that seems to be made by, for, and about 13-year-old boys. It is a mindless video game of a movie that throws a lot of cool action and impressive special effects up on the screen, but can't seem to think of anything else to do. So, it keeps on repeating the same tricks over and over. One skill that everyone within The Fraternity must hold is how to "curve a bullet". These are assassins so skilled, they can actually somehow control the path of the bullet after it's been fired, so that it can curve around any obstacle and hit the desired target. It's a cool effect the first time we see it, but when we see it the fifth or sixth time, it starts to lose its novelty. We get so many slo-mo shots of bullets whizzing around people's heads and objects, and even more slowed down shots of bullets smashing against each other in mid-air that by the end of the movie, I was kind of tired of seeing it. That's not to say the movie is not impressive on a technical level, because it certainly is. It just repeats the same images over and over.

Maybe that's because there's very little underneath the surface. Though based on a comic book by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, Wanted is extremely shallow and doesn't even seem to care about its characters. Wesley himself is more a composite of office drone cliches than a genuine fleshed out character. We've seen his type so many times before in other movies, it's hard to get behind him. When the movie finally allows him to get revenge on his tormentors, it is supposed to be a moment of freedom and liberation, but the movie never gives us enough of a reason to care about the guy, so it doesn't have quite the desired effect. I also had a hard time believing his amazing transformation from human doormat to a guy who can survive just about anything, since a majority of his training is handled in montages, and we never get a true sense of his progress. His fellow assassins at The Fraternity remain mysteries to us, as we learn next to nothing about them. This is obviously intentional on the part of the screenplay, but still, who wouldn't want to learn more about the guy Wesley works with who turns rats into walking bombs? As the female lead, Jolie pretty much gets ample opportunity to shoot at stuff with the aid of computer effects, and show off her body. She has little dialogue, and apparently this was a conscious decision on Jolie's part, as she thought it would make her character more mysterious. Unfortunately, we don't spend enough time with her character for her to even be considered mysterious.

For a majority of its running time, the movie tries to hold our interest with tired corporate satire that isn't as fresh or funny as it seems to think it is, and a lot of overblown action sequences that force us to ask how the computer animators pulled it off, instead of concentrating on the stunt work or physical action. Wanted would be a pretty forgettable experience were it not for a plot revelation late in the film. This was the first thing in the movie to actually grab my attention, and it's too bad the movie waits so long to pull it out, since much more could have been done with it. Since this happens with only about 20 minutes or so left in the film, it's pretty much an excuse to speed right ahead to the climactic shoot out. Wesley barely has time to even react to what he learns, and considering it's a pretty major development in his character, the fact that he goes right back to killing people as soon as he finds out about it makes him all the more shallow. When I said this movie has a 13-year-old boy mentality, I meant it. It's only interested in showing us stuff that's "cool", and cares little about anything or anyone else. This is one of those movies were I found myself asking why Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov didn't just go all the way with his live action video game approach, and add a score counter in the top corner of the screen?

Wanted obviously wants to be a big, dumb, violent piece of summer escapism, but there's absolutely nothing here to get excited about, and certainly nothing that we haven't seen before. It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, and has obviously been made with a great amount of care. I just found it hard to care about anything that was going on up on the screen. You see the movie, it fades from your mind almost the second you set foot outside of the theater, and you go on with your life. That's just the kind of film this is.

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