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Wanted

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

In Fight Club, Edward Norton meets someone who wakes him up the the joys of violence and mayhem, someone who is the epitome of everything Norton's office drone desires himself to be: Brad Pitt. In Wanted, the same thing happens, only the key person is Angelina Jolie.

Proof that Hollywood's biggest power couple represents the modern American ideal of perfection? Or just proof that both of them fit right at home in action movies? It doesn't matter, but the parallel is amusing, and it kept my brain busy during some of the more ridiculous parts of this new action thriller, directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

Bekmambetov is a star in Russia for directing two blockbusters, Night Watch and Day Watch, both of which boasted some terrific special effects despite having, by American standards, ultra-tiny budgets: about $5 million apiece. For his first film Stateside, Bekmambetov landed a $65 million budget (still relatively small considering even a movie like Evan Almighty saw its budget balloon to $175 million), and has put it to good use: Wanted is the most stylistically inventive action film since The Matrix.

No, it's not as good -- thanks to a very thin story, it's not in the same league -- but it's a lot of fun nonetheless. Bullets curve to their targets in slow motion, cars twirl through the air in perfect choreography, and trains are used very creatively.

James McAvoy stars as Wesley Gibson, the geeky office drone. His life sucks, his girlfriend's cheating on him, and when he Googles himself, nothing shows up. (I've found at least four other Michael Dances, so you'd think there'd be a few other Wesley Gibsons, but never mind.) But then Angelina Jolie -- playing someone, in an example of the movie's subtlety, named Fox -- saves his life from an assassin named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), and Gibson finds himself inducted into a secret society of assassins called the Fraternity.

It turns out that the Fraternity takes their orders from a giant loom called the Loom of Fate (snicker, snicker). See, Fate causes imperfections in the fabric, which create a secret binary code that produces the names of the Fraternity's targets. And no, even Morgan Freeman as the group's leader can't sell this explanation as being anything less than gloriously stupid.

Thus, the movie jumps through a bunch of crazy effects-filled fight scenes and training scenes in which, yes, Wesley learns how to curve a bullet. Thematically, the movie preaches -- rather heavily -- about disaffected 9 to 5 workers and the inner rage of the American male as if it's saying something new. All the early scenes with Wesley at his job are a strange hybrid of Fight Club and Office Space, skewing so close in tone to the former and setting to the latter that "rip-off" doesn't begin to describe it.

And the screenplay reeks of immaturity in more ...