Unrealistic, bloody yet it's worth the money

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2008)

This marks the fourth movie I have seen that stars James McAvoy. Like the other three movies, I enjoyed his performance. He plays Wesley Gibson, an average day American who has a job he hates and a girlfriend who doesn't respect him. One night, as he walks into a store, a mysterious called Fox (Angelina Jolie) walks up to him and tells him that his father was an assassin who was killed on top of the metropolitan building. She then saves his life from a ruthless assassin and introduces him to a secret organization called The Fraternity, led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman).
There he learns about his true past and follows his father's footsteps as being a trained killer. However, things are never as they seem. "Wanted" is an action flick with an R rating. Nothing much more. There's plenty of blood and gore in it, many times in slow motion, showing the bullets tear through people and making unpleasant exit wounds. Much of the time I felt like I was watching the present-day version of 300. This made the action at times boring.
In addition, many of the action sequences are stylized with unrealistic circumstances. For instance the first action sequence, it has a man jump through a window, pull out again, and shoot the bad guys on the building across from him, never missing a hit, then reaching the other building (which is probably a block away from the one he jumped out of) without an injury from the glass that would have torn him to shreds. Uh? The other thing I found almost comical was the idea of the assassins curving bullets. Okay, you just fling your gun, pull the trigger, and pray to god that you hit your target? Come on. In some instances, when two guys do this, and fire their weapons simultaneously, their bullets collide. Another impossibility. Maybe I just like the Bourne Ultimatum too much or I like The Matrix so much that anyone else copying off of the Wachowski brothers' ideas makes me laugh.
There isn't a whole lot of dialog said in the movie, save for James McAvoy who also narrates the movie, adding some offbeat humor to the film. Morgan Freeman wasn't too bad in his role, and Angelina Jolie was a sexy killer that wasn't fearful of showing her butt. I like that. I liked the action sequences even though they're extremely impossible to do. It was a good for the seven dollars, which it cost me, but I won't give it anything else. 7/10