Wanted: Plot Holes, Poor Special Effects Mar Action Movie

The movie "Wanted" had an interesting starting concept: suppose a secret society of assassins exists who can slow time and allow bullets to travel on curved trajectories. Then, suppose one of them, one of the best, decides to turn on the society. Finally, suppose that the only hope the society has of surviving is finding and training the hopelessly socially inept son of another of the best assassins, who has no idea, at first, who his father was. However, throw in a giant, autonomous loom, magical healing white water, bad special effects, and many star-wars like plot twists, and "Wanted" quickly becomes a movie that it is genuinely hard to keep from laughing at.

James McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, who is a timid man completely devoid of ambition. He is walked on by his boss, girlfriend, and best friend, broke, and on medication for anxiety attacks. Then he is approached in a grocery store by a beautiful woman (Angelina Jolie) who claims that she knew his father, that he recently died, and that the man who killed him is now in the store behind them. What follows is a bullets blazing, havok wreaking car chase through the city until, eventually, they get away from the assassin. It is revealed to Wesley that his father was an assassin and was recently killed by a rogue assassin that has turned against the secret society his father was a part of, called The Fraternity. Wesley is forced to choose between his lame, dead-end life, and the promise of a new, exciting life as a super-powered assassin. He chooses to become an assassin, undergoes training, and is eventually sent after Cross, the assassin who murdered his father.

The story has several weak spots. In the first place, the targets for the assassins are revealed to them by decoding the inconsistencies in cloth woven by a giant loom. They have named this loom "The Loom of Fate". Apparently, the loom decides who deserves to die and codes their name in binary into the cloth by deliberately setting errors. This is done Minority Report-style; the people who are killed have not necessarily done anything wrong yet, but apparently the loom knows what they are going to do in their future.

In order to allow Wesley's training as an assassin to be sufficiently brutal and bloody, the Fraternity has a magical liquid bath that congeals over the body into a flaky white substance reminiscient of baking soda and water, and heals even serious wounds within hours. This is important, because they loose no time beating Wesley until he is a bloody mess. The magical water is not explained, and it seems that it was placed in the movie for the sole purpose of allowing the training to be gory and life threatening.

Wesley's training is said to take approximately 6 weeks in the movie, the first couple of which he is doing nothing but being repeatedly beaten to a pulp and healed. However, by the end of the movie, he has become fit and well-muscled, and has suddenly gained an assassin's instinct the same as or better than those who have been in the fraternity for years. Apparently, because he is the son of the best, this rapid acquisition of muscles and skills is to be expected.

And, as I mentioned previously, there are several worn and predictable plot twists near the end. Many times during the movie, I was struck by the similarity of the lines and characters to those found in Star Wars.

The special effects of the movie leave something to be desired. Certainly, for an action movie, there is a lot of car crashing and gun shooting. There are many slow motion scenes of bullets hitting people-too many, in fact. By the end of the movie, one begins to think, "We're slowing this down again?" However, the worst special effects come near the end, and involve a large number of very poorly done rats. They were so clearly many levels below the effects of the rest of the movie that I was shocked out of the story when they appeared on the screen by the thought, "Are you kidding? You couldn't do better than that?"

The one redeeming quality of the movie was the decision that Angeline Jolie's character, Fox, made at the end of the movie. She, at least, believed in what she was doing and had the integrity to follow it through to the bitter end.

Overall, although the premise was interesting and "Wanted" could have been very good, the weakly patched plot holes and poor special effects distracted too much from the movie.