Preposterously Entertaining...

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2009)

Try as hard as I might, there was just no way I could get through the movie that was Timur Bekmambetov's intro to the U.S. and to sci-fi/fantasy fans everywhere, NIGHT WATCH. It had nothing to do with the subtitles - I'm rather used to those by now. The trailer for the movie looked amazing, so when I finally got to it and saw how over-the-top all the effects work was, for some reason I found it to be a turn-off. Therefore I did just that...turned the movie off.
I had no preconceived ideas about WANTED when it was first released, because I didn't have the advantage (or disadvantage, maybe?) of having read the Mark Millar graphic novel. All I knew from the previews is that Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman were in it, and because it looked so much like a "MATRIX" rip-off, it was a definite "wait for the DVD" selection in my book. So I waited and finally rented it.
Once the end credits rolled and I discovered that Bekmambetov was the director, it really didn't surprise me. What did bowl me over is that not only did his style fit this story, but that WANTED is one of the most preposterously entertaining movies I watched through all of 2008. Yes, it definitely resembled THE MATRIX more than just a little, but unlike that densely layered trilogy, it cheerfully and stubbornly refused to take on the earnest dead-seriousness of the Wachowski Brothers' cyberpunked-out mythology. And was all the better for not doing so.
I guess it's no secret by now that contrary to how it was presented in the oft-seen trailers, the hotter-than-Mount-Pinatubo-lava Angelina Jolie does NOT have the starring role here, though her character is pivotal to the wild plot line. That actually falls to James McAvoy (THE LAST KING OF Scotland, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA) who tries on an American accent (which works for the most part) to play dumped on ne'er-do-well Wesley Gibson. A man so mired in his own inability to care about his life or anything in it, he even buys the condoms his best friend is using to bang his girlfriend with.
The self-loathing/self-pity/masochist angle is familiar to us all, but gets poured on so thickly after the slam-bang opening of the first act, that we know that something incredible has to be coming down the pike to shake Wesley from his debilitating sense of ennui. That appears in the delectably dangerous form of Fox (Jolie), a super-assassin who in short order not only tells the nebbishy office drone that his own estranged father is also a pro-killer of the highest order, but that the man who did him in at the movie's opening is out to eliminate Wesley as well...leading to the movie's first and most breathtaking chase sequence.
If you've seen THE MATRIX, you know how to spell it out from here. The estimable Morgan Freeman stands in here for Laurence Fishburne, THE MATRIX itself makes an appearance here in the form of the "looms of fate" as tended by the organization of clandestine killers known as both "The Weavers" and "The Fraternity", and "bullet time" gets a whole new reimagining as weapons and ammo bend and twist in ways that conventional firepower is not meant to.
And of course, once Wesley descends far enough into this particular "rabbit hole", nothing is even close to what it initially appeared to be when he finally emerges from the other end.
I've read other reviews where viewers really took this movie to task for not adhering to the original Millar concept and characters. Since I have no previous knowledge of any of that, I can only go by the impression this movie left on me, and I can tell you that I was completely entertained, which is really all I was hoping for at the time. Well-done visual effects, great performances by the cast (and one line delivered by Freeman that probably brought the house down in the theaters where it played). Plus a fittingly cool and pulse-pounding soundtrack by Danny Elfman.
Admittedly, WANTED was tailor-made to appeal to 13-year-old gamers and fanboys, and the 13-year-old in me definitely approved.