Karate Kid with guns and cursing. Yeah. Whatever.

Rating: 3/10 (10 March 2009)

A pastiche of "ideas" cribbed from Chuck Palahniuk, the Wachowski Brothers, and Paul the Apostle, WANTED marries its stolen themes and characters to a visual style ripped from - hey! - David Fincher and the Wachowski Brothers. Plus a little Ringo Lam. MATRIX and FIGHT CLUB were about something, though. They were at least attempts at social commentary. This movie is about nothing. Well, okay. It's about two hours longer than not watching it.
The graphic novel might be great. I don't know. I haven't read it. Does that disqualify me from calling the movie a failed entertainment? A feature length series of wax-on, wax-off montage sequences? A childish, pointlessly potty-mouthed exercise in developmentally arrested wish fulfillment? No, it doesn't. How many more existential hit-man movies can we take? And how many hit men need to die before they realize they're always going to end up betrayed by their handlers? Don't they watch hit-man movies?
This is a gun fetish movie, in which a blocked barrel fails to blow up when the trigger is pulled. Maybe stress fracture biofeedback control was part of the training that got edited out. Or maybe this movie's just stuuuuuuupid.
How many contradictions does one bad shoot-em-up need, anyway? A girl who can bend bullets at 180 degrees can't shoot a guy driving a truck from right in front of him? A building blows up from the inside, and from the outside we see it explode , but from the inside the building's barely damaged? A father sends his son a message by shooting him and sending him to Moravia so he can meet him on a train... when he's standing about thirty feet away? He couldn't just talk to him?
And if Angelina Jolie gets any weirder looking, she's going to have to make all of her movies in motion-capture animation, just to seem human.