Ridiculous

Rating: 2/10 (13 December 2008)

First let me state that I'm all for the "implausible-but-fun" movie genre. Transporter 1 & 2 are good examples of films of this genre that work. They were fun to watch, and they didn't try to hard to "sell" the completely implausible plots and physically impossible action sequences. Who cares--they're fun to watch!
Not so with Wanted. First of all, the implausibility level rises past "implausible" and crashes right through "ridiculous" and into "time-wastingly bizarre" territory. What's worse, stupid dialog and over-obvious camera shots try too hard at every turn to sell what can't be sold. Doesn't the director get it?? We don't *want* to be sold--we'll go with your plot if you just deliver the action.
It starts in a promising way with some "Office Space" references. Wesley, a hapless office drone is henpecked by his annoying overweight female boss, who looks quite like the "Looks like you've got a case of the Mondays" lady. His cube-mate is taking a lot of time off for 'dentist appointments' to screw Wesely's girlfriend. Then one day he's saved by Angelina Jolie from what she says is an assassination attempt on him. OK, we can go with that...
...until she further explains that the attempt was by a rogue member of an assassination fraternity, of which his estranged father was the top member. This fraternity apparently exists only to do battle with another assassination fraternity. How they get paid is unknown, but they seem to have unlimited funds. They also carry out assassinations to "preserve order", but it looks a lot more like these two fraternities just run around killing each other.
The orders for whom to kill are delivered by a bizarre encryption method consisting of slight imperfections embedded into weaving patterns made by an ancient loom in their front-business--a textile mill near what looks like Goose Island in Chicago. They could have just said a secret "Mr. X" tells them who to kill but I digress. I would've bought the weaving-code thing if they hadn't spent so much time trying to explain it. Again--with movies like this they should just let it go and get on with the action--don't bore us with trying to explain how "if the vertical thread misses the weave and goes *over* the cross thread, it's a zero, and if the horizontal thread goes *under* the cross thread, it's a 1" or some such nonsense. I would've bought the stupid plot-point but it was oversold. Just get on with the action.
I could go on and on with the bizarre "initiation" process, where he's beaten up daily by "The Repairman", then covered in Krispy-Kreme glaze to 'accelerate the healing'. He learns how to curve a bullet so he can shoot around obstacles. That's where I almost fell asleep. Too much time spent on selling us on how he has to go through all of this to prepare himself to do this ultra-high-priority kill. And of course there are ***SPOILER ALERT*** ridiculous twists upon twists, where everyone he thought was bad was actually good, and vice versa. Or were they? Oh, who cares. It was a waste of time.
If the movie had just spent a bit more time with some better action sequences then it might've risen to the level of entertainment, but I felt it was extremely overwrought and and downright boring at times.