Pretty bad

Rating: 3/10 (9 October 2009)

So, you probably heard that Wanted was a pretty decent movie. Well, I'm here to tell you, you heard wrong. This is a movie wallowing in its own absurdity and nihilism.
McAvoy puts on a fairly decent lead performance. When the movie starts his character is a loserly desk jockey whose girlfriend is cheating on him, and he gets yelled at by his annoying boss. These scenes are funny but a little clichéd. As soon as he becomes an assassin, he stops being a loser. Hmm...
The term suspension of disbelief is just begging to be used here. OK, so they expect the audience to believe the following: That certain people can slow down time by sheer adrenaline, that you can bend bullets while in this slowdown, and that you can defy every law of physics while in this state. Taking this as a comic book fantasy, I'm willing to look the other way to a point. But there's things that happen in this movie that are beyond impossible, like shooting a bullet through a can, a donut, a train, and into a guy's head from 50 miles away.
The way the assassins get their missions is also completely ridiculous. Somehow a giant weave makes a code kind of like the viking Norns, and gives a name of a person to be killed. Why are they being killed? It's not important. The assassinations take on a sadistic quality and at no point did I care about any of it. Even more sadistic is the fraternity itself, who constantly beat the living daylights out of each other like some kind of Fight Club, then heal themselves with some mysterious waxy substance. All of the fraternity characters save one are poorly developed, and I have to say Angelina Jolie is miscast. She has the looks for the role but not the range. She just didn't fit the character.
The last 30 minutes or so of this movie need special mention. There will be spoilers aplenty here, so be warned. There is a big train crash scene where about 200 people die, but the only important thing is that McAvoy kills his target who turns out to be his real father, and then somehow he survives a 500 foot drop into a river. He gets rescued by Terence Stamp of all people, in a surprisingly decent expositional role. Apparently the fraternity isn't the real fraternity, and Morgan Freeman was killing people for profit. How exactly does that make him a profit? Anyways, everyone at the fraternity had been targeted by the almighty spool of thread, and are therefore evil. So McAvoy busts in and brutally kills all his friends, Angelina Jolie kills herself and Morgan Freeman escapes, only to be killed later. Did I mention that this movie is really, really upbeat?
One of my biggest problems with this movie is that it's predictable. Everyone who seems evil actually is. You know they have to end with a big action scene, so at some point the fraternity have to become the bad guys. It sort of evens itself out by making every underdeveloped guy evil, but simply by the tone of the movie you know how it has to end. Oh and apparently mice can drink gasoline without dying and become walking time bombs. Seriously.
There's a couple of decent action scenes in this movie, and the script has its moments but overall this movie is bad to it's core. It's sheer ludicrousness and nihilism make it not worth the time.