Review: Wanted, (2008) Directed by Timur Bekmambetov and Starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie

Sometimes when younger people compare movies that have come out more recently versus "older" films, they'll often say, "Boring! I was looking for more action and excitement; I want an escape." Wanted is a prime example of a film geared toward this audience. The movie does give us action, gunplay and violence, but not "excitement." Wanted is a sensory overload whose imitation of Fight Club and the original Matrix ultimately fails because of its excesses and lack of ideas. Wanted appeals to our baser tendencies, and made me feel coerced and manipulated into a fictive world where in order to enjoy the movie, I had to assume that my life is so boring that only excessive action and violence can stir my deadened senses. Action sequences a film does not make.

Wanted is based on a supervillain comic book that came out in the 2003 imagining a world where the good superheroes had lost out to their supervillain enemies. However, the film adaptation drops the superhero regalia and asks us to imagine real people with superhuman abilities. We take on the perspective of Wesley Gibson, who is by his own account a huge loser, with a miserable job and a best friend that bangs his girlfriend. Picking up another prescription for anxiety pills, Wesley is saved by Fox (Angelina Jolie) from a would-be assassin. After leaving his former life in a cubicle farm, Wesley finds out that his panic attacks are actually his genetic potential itching for escape: his heart can beat 400 times a minute and his excess adrenalin gives him superhuman abilities. After a harsh crash course to become a member of The Fraternity, a group of super-assassins who maintain the world's balance of good and evil, Wesley is finally ready to take on the man that tried to kill him and is attempting to destroy The Fraternity: Cross.

Now, this story does have the makings of a good action flick, but even the most shallow action movie needs character development. With Russian/Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov, the more Wanted succeeds in wowing us with chase scenes and Matrix-stylebullet-time special effects, the worse the storytelling, script and acting seems. And this is despite the efforts of serious actors James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. Add the gruesomeness of seeing a bullet travel through a human head in slow motion, and you've got elements that just don't make sense together. Wanted simply asks us to suspend our disbelief too much.

The source of this lack of cohesiveness must be the director, Bekmambetov, who directed two successful vampire movies in Russia. While he surely knows English well enough to get a job directing a big-budget Hollywood production, he does not understand the appeal of The Matrix and Fight Club. When Wanted uses characters and plot devices from those precursors, they come off wooden and formulaic. James McAvoy's character Wesley comes off as derivative of the protagonists in both those movies: his cubicle-farm life sucks (like yours, hint hint), he finds special abilities and joins a cool underground society (with a hot chick, of course) and then finds out unknown secrets about his past ("shocking" plot turns). Wanted is not so much a movie as it is a catchy pitch to a Hollywood mogul: "It's Fight Club meets Matrix meets Face/Off!" It's the kind of manipulation that made me think, "Wow, did I just pay to see this?"

Any good movie is always a successful marriage of content and form -- story and style. Wanted is all style and no substance, which isn't so bad for an action flick, but when the elements are manipulative and nonsensical, it's not your life that's boring -- it's the movie you're watching.