Un-Wanted

Rating: 2/10 (3 July 2008)

*Warning, contains 'plot' spoilers*
"What the f*** have you done lately?"
Oh, something tells me they're going to regret closing this hackneyed, insipid rubbish with that line! I'm sure I'm not the only person who, upon hearing that, replied with "Well, been screwed out of £6 for this piece of trash!"
As much as I hate mentioning such outstanding films in the same breath as 'Wanted', it tries to take elements of the stylish, breath-taking action from The Matrix, attempts to copy the dark, sharp witted humour from Fight Club, and fuse them together to make an unforgettable cinematic experience. Works fine on paper. In fact, looking back over that, I rather like the sound of it!
This shocker of a film, however, ranks in the same league as the appalling Doomsday, and that really is saying something. James McAvoy plays Wesley, an ordinary office worker who is frustrated by his tedious, repetitive lifestyle, and yearns for something more. Believe me, after enduring 20 entire minutes of this being made painfully obvious, you'll completely empathise. He soon meets Angelina Jolie, the cue for the first of the movie's many gratuitous action scenes. I never thought I would hear myself say this, but this film had *too much* action. So much of it is unnecessary and crow-barred in solely for the sake of it.
The fella apparently trying to kill McAvoy is later revealed to be his father, although makes no attempt to inform his son of this at this particular moment, or at any other time they meet... well, until Wesley has just fired a bullet into his chest. The 'Luke, I'm your father' plot line completely sums up the extent of original concepts this film has to offer.
The scenes where Wesley is being beaten half to death as some sort of initiation rite to gain entry into the Fraternity, a league of assassin weavers from 1000 years ago, are again pointless and, while I'm not opposed to graphic scenes when they serve a purpose, it's all just so unnecessary. He's then placed in a bath of an unknown solution which heals his wounds, just so they can squeeze even more torture in, and still have it 'make sense'.
Morgan Freeman plays Sloane, the leader of the Fraternity in quite easily the worst, most uninspired role I have ever seen him cast in. He explains to McAvoy that they take their orders from a loom... Yeah, just think about that for a second. A giant 'loom of fate', no less, in which discrepancies in the stitching eventually spell out the name of the next person to be killed, by way of binary code. An idea born out of minimum thought, and executed with way too much.
Wesley discovers that Sloane is now just making the hits up as he goes along, and so begins one of the worst plot devices ever conceived. He rounds up 1000 rats by filling a garbage truck with peanut butter, and then attaches bombs to each of them, before crashing said truck into the gates of the Fraternity building and setting them lose. They quickly infiltrate each and every area of the building and subsequently destroy it in the space of about a minute. Yeah, they disperse into even numbers and happen to end up everywhere, even upstairs... inside a minute. Surely the garbage lorry would still reek of peanut butter, so why would they even leave it?
After crashing in through a window, McAvoy then charges through the building while gunning down a multitude of Sloane's men. A shameful rip-off of The Matrix's famous 'lobby scene', by this point predictably sloppy and, for a final set piece, surprisingly bland, this leads to the scene where Sloane is confronted, and it is revealed that he alone is behind the hits; nobody else within the Fraternity had any idea. This does mean that Wesley has just slaughtered countless completely innocent men who whole-heartedly, if blindly, believe they are doing the right thing. This cold-blooded mass murder is completely overlooked, and the final dreary scene plays out packed with yet more implausible tripe.
How on earth this movie has scored a 7.5 to date on this site is beyond me; I can only pray that nobody with the power to churn out this kind of garbage is paying attention.