Decent Action movie with standard excellent effects and ridiculous plot

Rating: 8/10 (25 December 2008)

Wesley Gibson isn't exactly leading the life of his dreams. He's stuck in a dead-end job presided over by a tyrannical bitch, his best friend is having sex with his slattern girlfriend, his bank account doesn't allow him to retrieve $5, and he suffers from random panic attacks that send him scrambling for his pills.
One evening while refilling said pills, a pretty woman arrives and tells him his father (whom he had not known since birth) was assassinated on a rooftop the day before. She then embarks in a furious firefight against a would-be assassin, with Wesley caught in between.
If you think this is about as tense as it gets for him, think again. In this action movie directed by relative newcomer Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted is a skillful mixture of high-octane fights and chases interspersed with storyweaving and character development. Both aspects are done remarkably well  nothing stellar perhaps, but better than your average Action flick.
Anyway. The movie takes a little while to settle in, allowing us to meet and understand the protagonist and the woes of his pathetic life, and although the pacing can be a little on the slow side at times, it's never really annoying or limiting for one's experience of the film. Soon Wesley is brought into a group known as The Fraternity: a thousand-year-old secret organization of assassins that carry out Fate's dirty work by killing marks chosen by a sort of prescient loom. Now, seeing as you yourself probably had to read that doozie twice, imagine what poor Wesley must be thinking  and not only because he finds he's able to wield a gun for the first time in his life to shoot the wings off a bunch of flies.
Eventually he decides to join the Fraternity after 'quitting' his job in a rather beautiful manner, yet his training is less about instructing him with assassination skills and techniques, and more about beating, cutting and berating the living crap out of him. One could wonder what beating a man to a pulp over and over again has to do with training him to become a more efficient killer, but perhaps that's all part of something I don't quite see eye-to-eye with. Anyway, moving on.
The storyline is a long and archaic one, full of twists that are as unpredictable as they are intriguing. It's also about as plausible as mankind ever deciding to commence world peace. From men jumping hundreds of feet from office tower to office tower, to a young and average man suddenly possessing marksmanship talents to make Bob 'The Nailer' Lee Swagger jealous, the action sequences in this movie, while exhilarating and pulse-pounding, are remarkably lacking in credibility or realism. Thankfully the special effects are well-enough executed to hide this fallacy, and the result is an incredibly implausible yet highly entertaining action feature. The whole movie is basically like The Matrix, only minus the swooshing trenchcoats, cool sunglasses and evil computers. We even have a form of 'bullet-time', such as several creative and stimulating shots of bullets colliding in mid-air, though any reference is likely to be unintentional, and merely the product of my over-developed criticism muscle.
The acting is strong and solid: James McAvoy is credible in his performance as poor Wesley Gibson, and Angelina Jolie is as powerful (and seducing) as ever as the enigmatic and ruthless Fox. Morgan Freeman is once again cast as a wise, all-knowing old man, this time as the leader of the Fraternity, Sloan.
The movie has several instances of grotesque images or dialogue, from a pointlessly vulgar vernacular to some rather troubling shots of blood and gore (not to mention a particular scene near the end that will make any Animal Rights activists explode). One can debate whether such graphic content was really needed; not that I mind all that much, it just seemed slightly forced  or inversely, unrestrained. But overall, quite unimportant  no-one's gonna be offended by a few swear words or bullet holes when they go to see a movie about a bunch of professional assassins. Unless they're retards.
* * * * * For hitting the screen with brilliant action sequences that unfortunately somewhat lack in the credibility area, I award Wanted 7.5 curving bullets out of 10.