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WANTED
straddles the line between the delightfully absurd and
the merely ridiculous. As its heroes race through the
city at barely subsonic speeds, they execute the kind of
maneuvers that are normally performed only by
eight-year-olds making “vroom vroom” noises. As
digital-effects approach seamless integration with
live-action footage, what dazzles is not the
sophistication of the technology but the audacity of the
ideas, and Wanted has audacity to burn.
Wesley
Gibson
(James McAvoy) is a nobody. Really, the nobody. He’s
such a blank that he doesn’t even show up on Google. A
scrawny, squeaky-voiced cubicle drone, he is henpecked
by his girlfriend, cuckolded by his best friend and
bullied by his petty tyrant boss. It’s enough to make
you want to kill somebody.
Wesley
is filling his latest prescription for antianxiety meds
when a sly, feline creature named Fox
(Angelina Jolie) offers him stress relief through
homicide. Fox informs Wesley that he, like his father,
was born into a shadowy fraternity of superpowered
assassins who can flood their bodies with adrenaline at
will, giving them superhuman strength, speed and the
ability to shoot bullets in wicked, curving arcs.
Wesley
barely has time to absorb the news when he is swept
quite literally off his feet. Pursued, he is told, by
the rogue fraternity member who killed his father and
has designs on him, Wesley stands helplessly in the
street until Fox approaches in a speeding car, which
goes into a 360-degree spin, knocks a goggle-eyed Wesley
into its passenger seat and speeds off without so much
as a tap of the brake pedal.
At this
point, Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted presents you with a
choice. You can let yourself, like Wesley, be carried
off by a slick vehicle moving at breakneck speed, or you
can grumble, mutter something about the laws of physics
and start checking your watch. After a training process
that consists mainly of being beaten into several kinds
of hamburger (the movie, which is not for the squeamish,
showcases multiple scenes of extravagant violence),
Wesley is initiated by the fraternity’s dapper head
honcho, Sloan ( Morgan Freeman), who explains that the
brotherhood was founded by a clan of weavers who saw a
chance to alter the world’s destiny. What turned these
men of the cloth into stone-cold killers is never
exactly explained.
The
fraternity takes its orders from a giant contraption
called the Loom of Fate, which issues the names of
targets through a code embedded in its fabric. The
assassins are not meant to question, merely to accept
their role in some grand, unseen design. That this means
killling people without any hint as to their crimes
bothers Wesley only briefly.
In a
movie that musters barely more than a dozen speaking
parts, there are heroes and there is cannon fodder. In a
thrilling face-to-face battle that sends a passenger
train plummeting into a gorge, there’s not even a pause
to acknowledge the collateral damage of the duel between
supermen. Bekmambetov savors the way a target’s forehead
explodes as a bullet burrows through from the back, but
the slaughter of innocents fails to hold his interest.
As much
fun as it is to watch Bekmambetov play with his action
figures, the movie would be more engaging if he ever got
under their polyurethane skin. McAvoy tries mightily to
bridge the gap between wheezy nebbish and eager
assassin, but there’s nothing pushing him forward beyond
the movie’s pronounced contempt for his former life. In
Wanted’s cosmos, there are wolves and there are sheep,
and the sheep are not even worth pitying.
Jolie is
all wolf, kohl-eyed and coldblooded. But for all her
lethal skills (and drop-dead physique), there’s
something approachable about her. She plays Fox with a
hint of sardonic remove and a touch of down-to-earth
grit, as if this pumped-up killing machine hasn’t
forgotten what it’s like to be one of the girls. She
puts her catsuit on one leg at a time.
Wanted’s
hyperkinetic antics are sometimes weighed down by a
surfeit of adolescent misanthropy. But the
adrenaline-overdose strategy works for viewers, as well
as hit men. As long as Bekmambetov keeps the pedal to
the metal, you don’t notice the rotten scenery outside.
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