A thrill ride that is "Wanted"

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2008)

In the summer action movie sweepstakes, Wanted is the prize winner. Based on a six-issue comic series by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, Wanted provides the appropriate thrills, action and engagement needed for a strong summer movie extravaganza.
Wanted focuses on Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a nobody in a minor, dead-end job with an overbearing boss and a best friend who is getting horizontal with Wesley's girlfriend during lunch breaks. However, when picking up a prescription one day, Wesley is greeted by Fox (Angelina Jolie), who informs him he is the son of a great assassin who was just murdered by another assassin, and is now the killer's target. She takes him on a whirlwind chase, and then introduces him to Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the head of the Fraternity, an order of assassins a thousand years old. Sloan informs Wesley that he has the same potential to be a superb assassin as his father, and thus leads to Wesley standing up to his boss, his girlfriend, his friend and beginning his training to become a member of the Fraternity.
Wanted exudes much of the same energy as The Matrix, as well as sharing a similar visual flair, without necessarily ripping off the former film. When the action sequences kick in, they are a rather spectacular sight to behold, featuring a great deal of stylization and visual acrobatics that astonish supremely. Yes, the logic behind many moments in Wanted is completely nonexistent, featuring such elements as "curving" bullets and killers so trained that they can manage to shoot a weapon with the exact trajectory to stop another oncoming bullet. But that doesn't really matter, Wanted grabs you when necessary and you just come along for the ride. The film is also helped along by some very strong visual effects that blend rather seamlessly with the surrounding live-action material.
Wanted, much like the early summer success Iron Man, also understands that to really get into a story, we have to be involved in the characters, and with Wanted, our entry point is Wesley. He starts out as a character almost all of us can identify with, the downtrodden cog in the machine, coasting through his days with a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness. By letting us feel sympathy for Wesley, we have a rooting interest in what happens later, and therefore are involved in the film's action.
James McAvoy gives us a vulnerable character in the form of Wesley at the beginning of Wanted, who then transforms into an assassin, but we never lose our identification with him. Angelina Jolie doesn't have a whole lot of dialogue, but makes an impression as Fox nonetheless. Morgan Freeman fills his character with a mixture of both authority and menace, proving once again what a masterful actor he is.
Wanted is nothing tremendous on the plot front, it doesn't offer the audience anything too deep, but that is not necessary. It is a summer thrill ride, and at that, it succeeds exceptionally.