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 The latest comic-book tie-in, directed by little-known Russian director Timur Bekmanbetov, offers style but no substance.
When a business executive gets a designer bullet in his forehead from several blocks away, James McAvoy's Wesley Gibson, an office clerk, discovers he is next in the killer's sights - and that he has deadly super powers. These powers - the ability to bend bullets, jump buildings, or see movement in slow motion (Matrix, anyone) - gain him entry to "The Agency," a group of assassins led by Morgan Freeman, whose henchmen include a tattooed Angelina Jolie. The Agency promises to train McAvoy, but with a catch: he must assassinate any person whose name, 'in code,' appears in cloth woven on a special loom.
On paper, Wanted sounds like a psychological thriller. In practice, this special-effects-obsessed production continually ignores the inherent tragicomedy: that its characters, flushed with power, become corrupted by extreme moral abdication - to 'fate,' authority, revenge, a brutal training programme, the will of a sewing machine. On moral autopilot, they shoot strangers; flip over a police blocade; conduct gunfights in shopping centres; crash trains over bridges - yet all the director seems interested in is the action.
The same blig pattern repeats itself. To train McAvoy, a fat Spaniard teaches him knife-fights; a Brit smacks his gut to toughen him up. But between violent episodes he takes a 'healing bath,' which restores him i naflash. Jolie flashes her tattoos. The film rushes onto its next action piece.
Even when McAvoy is asked to bend bullets round 'real dead corpses' ("you need to know how it feels to put a bullet in a body," a henchman pontificates), nothing acknowledges the intense emotional conflict of the image: that we are being shown 'heroes' practicing on someone's mother or father. Like a monkey sucking fat off a chicken dinner, McAvoy, capers around, jumping off trains, shooting at strangers, capturing rats, tying plastic explosive to their backs, trying to look angry.
Frankly, who cares? With Iron Man, Hulk, Batman, and even Indiana Jones senior saving the world in 2008, you might as well lock yourself in the loo at Oulu library doing kungfu kicks in front of the mirror.
Wanted's one of those films you know is rubbish but watch for the cosmic production values. It's like Jumper but slightly better, which isn't saying much.
Two and a bit out of five.
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