I thought it was alright but not much more than that.

Rating: 5/10 (18 June 2012)

Wanted is set in Chicago where Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) works in an office as an accounts manager, he is bored with his life & feels that it's pointless. While in a supermarket Wesley is saved by a woman (Angelina Jolie) who he has never met before after an assassin named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) tries to kill him, the woman who turns out to be called Fox takes Wesley back to an old textile mill which is a front for a secret organisation of assassins known as The Faculty which was founded a thousand years ago to kill people that fate decides in order to keep the balance between good & evil in the world. Wesley meets Sloan (Morgan Freeman) who runs the show & is told that Cross used to be a member of The Factulty but left & is killing other members of one-by-one & that Cross has already killed Wesley's father. The Factulty train Wesley to be a top assassin in order to go after & kill Cross but all is not as it seems as Wesley discovers he has been lied to...
This American & German co-production was directed by Timur Bekmambetov & is generally considered one of the better big budgeted Hollywood action films of recent years & while it's entertaining enough & I have no major problem with it I have to say I don't consider Wanted the classic that many seem to, I will stop short of calling it a bad film because it's not but I can't bring myself to call it a great one either. Wanted is loosely based on a graphic novel comic book miniseries by Scottish artist Mark Millar published between 2003 & 2004, apparently the main difference is that The Faculty in the comic book was run by super villains who killed all the superheroes or something like that as I have never even heard of the comic books before watching the film so I really don't know anything about them. While a lot of the people who rate th film Wanted enjoy the totally unrealistic & psychically impossible action scenes like cars flipping over & doing barrel rolls mid air to the way certain character's can bend bullets round corners or make them fly in perfect circles I found these cartoon style scenes off putting & took me right out of the film & just stopped it dead as I was left shaking my head, sure some of the best action films around are far fetched & stretch credibility but the things that happen in Wanted are just too silly & left me cold & detached from the plot twists & story which aren't that great anyway. Everything about Wanted is a stretch really, from the plot twists to the fact that within a few weeks Wesley has turned into some super assassin who takes out the entire Faculty without them even getting a shot off at him. Wanted probably works best during it's first half as we are introduced to Wesley & his boring nine to five life as he is used & abused by everyone around him, his narration is quite funny & there are some amusing scenes like when he tells his fat boss what he thinks of her & going to the cash machine & seeing messages that mock his life but as has been said before it feels a lot like Fight Club (1999) during these scenes, they have a certain dry, ironic relevance & a lot of what Wesley says seems to make sense & might be all too familiar for a lot of us I suppose.
At just over 100 minutes long Wanted zips along at a nice pace, to be fair to it Wanted never lets up & there's overblown action scene after overblown action scene that seem to have been written, designed & shot purely to look cool & not much else. From cars flipping over each other to acrobatics on high speed trains to a derailment to crashing cars, car chases, shoot-outs, explosions, fights & a very attention grabbing opening in which a guy leaps hundreds of feet between skyscrapers while firing & taking out a team of assassins as he flies through the air. Wanted is pretty violent as well, there';s a fair bit of blood & a few scenes of bullets travelling in slow motions as they go through people's heads & burst out the front splattering blood everywhere.
With a supposed budget of about $75,000,000 a lot of money was spent on Wanted & it show's with no expense spared action scenes & CGI computer effects which are pretty good. Filmed in Illinois, New York & Prague in the Czech Republic. The acting is alright, Morgan Freeman seems bored, James McAvoy seems a bit boyish & slight to be a tough action hero while Angelina Jolie is as awful as always & again Wanted proves you should not hire rappers like Common to try & act.
Wanted is a decent enough action film as long as you can suspend every ounce of disbelief you have, I mean every ounce of it. Wanted works best when it's trying to be humorous & has some amusing dark satire that feels all to familiar, look I thought Wanted was a good film & I'd recommend it & watch it again but I didn't think it was as great as many seem to. Apparently a sequel is currently in development.