Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008) **

Dir. Timur Bekmambetov
Starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terrence Stamp, Common


Wanted is a movie with outrageous action scenes that defy any sense of logic or understanding of physics. The filmmakers are clearly interested in freeing themselves from such constraints when devising these sequences. There's certainly nothing wrong with this. At it's best, Wanted is an exhilerating ride, filled with so many spectacular feats that go so far over the top, you're not sure whether to laugh or applaud. That's why it's so strange that the film takes a big detour in the second act and focuses on a series of sequences filled with nothing but unpleasant brutality.

James McAvoy's main character is named Wesley, but he might as well have been named CC Baxter. Not only is he stuck in a dead end cubicle job, but the only sex going on in his apartment is between his girlfriend and best friend. Things change instantly when he meets a beautiful woman who goes by the name of Fox (Angelina Jolie). Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of a gunfight, as Fox tries to protect him from a would be assassin. The extended gunfight and frenetic car chase is an exciting action set piece and gets the movie off to a promising start. Unfortunately, that promise would quickly dissipate.

Wesley learns that his father was a member of a team of assassins with special abilities like bending a bullet. Sensing that he has similar abilities as his father, they have recruited him to join their ranks. Wesley decides that his humdrum life is not worth living and takes up the challenge. The bulk of the second act focuses on Wesley's training and it is here where the film seriously falls apart. What was an exciting, if ridiculous action movie, now became a dark exercise in brutal training sequences. It's as if director Timur Bekmambetov wanted to turn a stylish action pic into his own version of Fight Club. A few moments of this would have worked for the necessary, but it was a colossal mistake to spend so much time on it and to do it in an annoyingly repetitive fashion.

That being said, the film does wake up for a fairly exciting conclusion. The promise of the beginning is finally realized with a series of creative action scenes. Particularly fascinating is an extended cat and mouse game on a passenger train that turns deadlier than you might expect. Unfortunately, there was little reason to care about the ridiculous story at this point, so what we end up with was a nice technical display of cinematic skill, but it was hard to truly care about the fate of the characters, and the hopelessly banal resolution didn't help matters.

It should be noted that the strong cast does what they can with the material. Angelina Jolie's Fox remains a mystery throughout the film, but her stunning screen presence more than makes up for that. Morgan Freeman shows up as the leader of the assassin group, and this is the kind of role that he could sleepwalk through. It's not going to be one of his most memorable performances, but he lends a certain credibility to the story that would have seemed even more ridiculous in the hands of a lesser actor.

Wanted was based on a comic book miniseries of the same name, so it's possible that some of storytelling problems remain from the original source material. That still does not excuse the filmmakers from their poor decisions. If you pick a bad story for your source material and make a film out of it, then your film still has a bad story. Whatever the reasoning, Bekmambetov took what could have been a fun, original action movie and ruined it with a thoroughly unpleasant middle section.