Great Action

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2008)

Wanted (2008)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
James McAvoy plays a common man who has a girlfriend cheating on him while he's at work with a boss his hates. One day he gets swept up into a league of assassins and learns that he must avenge the murder of his father. This is the type of action movie that not only asks for you to turn you brain off but also asks that you rip it out, shred it up and then eat it down just for entertainment. This movie doesn't contain a single shot that doesn't have some sort of CGI going on, which to me is a major drag but at the same time you have to give the film credit for its imagination, which is on overdrive from the opening scene to the closing credits. The plot of this film really isn't all that important, although you could call it a dumbed down, male version of Le Femme Nikita. The reason people are going to jump at this film is for its action sequences, which are all very entertaining as soon as you learn not to take them very seriously. If you take the movie too serious you're going to wonder how, in the first chase sequence, the fastest car in the world can't out run an assassin driving a beat up truck, which probably couldn't hit more than sixty-five miles per hour. The other action scenes including killing someone from a L-train, a train falling off a bridge plus countless other explosions with some including rats. All of these scenes will keep you entertained but for my money they aren't great scenes since all of them are faked with CGI. Give me The French Connection or any Buster Keaton film for real action. For a video game the stuff here is good but I could never call them among the greatest ever made. The performances are better than you'd expect from a popcorn film with McAvoy once again impressing me very much. He perfectly captures his character's weakness early in the film and is believable as the trained killer. Morgan Freeman is pretty much wasted as the leader of the cult and Angelina Jolie at least looks good in her brief nude scene.