Chances are you will walk out of Wanted murmuring, “We’ve seen this before, haven’t we?” You won’t be alone. Wanted, while certainly not a remake of The Matrix films, nonetheless borrows heavily from their aesthetic and it is this aesthetic that will stick with you long after the story has faded. Is it possible to find something completely absurd and yet also be swept away by it? All in all, Wanted does not work. To enjoy it, one must forgo the untidy sum and revel in the remarkable parts.
Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy doing a respectable, if distracting American accent) is a spineless, dull, over-medicated office drone who can no more stand up to his abusive boss than his cuckolding girlfriend. But Wesley’s life of tedium is cut short with the appearance of Fox (Angelina Jolie), a woman who claims that Wesley’s estranged father was recently murdered and he alone has the power to bring the murderer to justice.
Fox introduces Wesley to Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the inscrutable leader of The Fraternity, a secret society that has been upholding justice for thousands of years by assassinating the world’s worst evildoers. Sloan and his team of viciously brilliant tutors begin training Wesley to unlock potential he never knew he had within him — lightning-fast reflexes and explosive agility.
As Wesley’s strength grows, he begins to discover who he was truly meant to be. But as he sets out at last to avenge his father’s murder, Wesley learns that not everything with his new associates is what it seems.
Wanted is based upon Mark Millar’s graphic novel series and represents the first English-speaking film by Russian director and stunning visualist Timur Bekmambetov. As with Bekmambetov’s other films (Night Watch, Day Watch), Wanted is pure visual fantasy, hyper-stylized imagery set to adrenaline-fueled action sequences of outrageous audacity and blistering violence. The danger is here is that Wanted will suffer the same fate as the dreadful Mission Impossible: 2 — while we accept the audacity of the stunt work in The Matrix because we understand that it takes place within an artificial construct, we reject it in other films that claim to be grounded in reality.
Even if you accept that normal human beings can leap tall buildings and run faster than a speeding bullet by virtue of a greater dose of adrenaline in their systems, there’s always the Loom of Fate, which, through no prime mover other than fate itself, spells out the names of those to be assassinated in weaved threads. Who thinks this stuff up?
There’s no doubt, Wanted is a guy’s movie if ever there was one, a film that equates violence to beauty, has scantly clad women firing heavy weaponry as often as possible and thrums with an empowering “get up and take control of your life before it’s too late” message. What it means that the showpiece for this mantra finds his calling as a merciless killer I’ll leave to you.
Pilfering elements from The Matrix, Batman Begins, and The Fight Club, Wanted is an equal mix of cringe-inducing and jaw-dropping scenes woven together into a tapestry that looks sensational from afar but up close is revealed to be a disordered mess.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.