Blood and Bullets but no Brains

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2008)

Wanted is one of the best looking bad films of recent years. It has tremendous style and the set design and action sequences are very fun. It's really too bad the filmmakers forgot to wrap something around them, movies generally need a plot. Wanted has one of the stupidest premises in recent years, so stupid I felt insulted watching it. It reads as if it was written by pre-pubescent ten year old boys. I honestly wonder if the intelligent Morgan Freeman read the damn thing or had his agent give him the jist of it.
Wanted starts off as an all most Office Space rip off. James McAvoy is a highly unlikeable whiny accountant named Wesley Gibson who doesn't seem to have a grasp on his life. He complains and yet he lets the world bite him in the ass every day. His problems are supposed to be all solved when he meets Fox who brings him to Sloan and tells him he has the blood of an assassin. Wesley agrees to train to be an assassin and his training consists of self-torture where I actually was rooting for the trainers. After a Rocky-esqe montage Wesley is a killing machine given the mission of a life time from Sloan who surprise surprise isn't all that he seems.
I've heard people defend this picture saying it is escapist action fun. Well I pose this what are we trying to escape from? Compentency in making a motion picture? If you want escapist action fun rent The Matrix which Wanted is essentially a rip off of. Wanted pretends to be deep and clever and have mythology behind it. Sloan tells Wesley that they kill out of fate alone and their targets are chosen by binary code stitched into a sacred shroud. Surprisingly all the targets live in the Chicagoland area where the film takes place. The concept of fate choosing the targets is somewhat interesting but how it is executed is stupid. If this shroud is so sacred and the Fraternity wouldn't they have killed every target? What is even more stupid is that Fox places blind faith in it to the point where she commits suicide at the end of the film.
I guess the thing that frustrates me the most about Wanted is it's talented leads shouting out dribble. I would think the very talented Angelina Jolie would be smarter than to take a picture to be eye candy and eye candy alone. Fox doesn't do or say anything she is a prop not a character. The film's salvage point is where the Morgan Freeman character is revealed to be a villain. I like Morgan Freeman and think he is one of the finest actors we have today. I want to see him challenged because he is essentially the morality figure in every film he is in. I thought good we will finally get to see Freeman be evil, well he doesn't get to do anything as a villain at all. McAvoy's character gets the most screen time brutally killing the entire Fraternity with suicide bomber rats. Freeman doesn't give any reasoning into why he is a villain or why his name may have been chosen by the shroud. He is there to look villainous and to die, nothing more. Morgan Freeman deserved better as did the audience.