Review: “Wanted” Has No Business Being As Cool As It Is

By Andy Hunsaker
Fancast Movies

As Jon Stewart told Wanted star James McAvoy on The Daily Show this week, “Here’s what’s crazy about this movie - it should suck, but it doesn’t!”

That’s a statement I have to concur with - this movie has no real business being good. It’s about a bunch of hotshot self-righteous bullet-bending assassins who get their mystical targets from some weird magical loom that Morgan Freeman has to interpret. It’s based on a comic book where the lead character looked like Eminem. It should just be another horrible action movie.

Yet with director Timur Bekmambatov and his unique visual style, we have really viscerally enjoyable flick on our hands.

Watch the red-band restricted trailer for Wanted.
Watch clips from Wanted:
Viper Chase
Flies
Curve the Bullet
Attack on Mr. X

Watch interviws with the cast and director of Wanted.

Sure, it’s disjointed a bit in the middle, and feels a bit hastily edited at points. Sure, they get their marks from a weaving contraption. But what makes this movie work as well as it does are the truly imaginative and beautiful action sequences and it’s occasional moments of visceral release. One keyboard smash in the face goes an awfully long way.

McAvoy does a reasonably good job as the schlubby, depressed loser Wesley Gibson who gets a magical rescue from his life of humdrummery by Angelina Jolie’s enigmatic sexypants Fox (a character drawn in the comic series to be the spitting image of Halle Berry, oddly enough). McAvoy’s transformation into a magic-bullet deathbringer is rather cathartic, although one dissonant moment I did notice is that when he finally tells off his bitchy boss, he has to couch it language that drives the point home to the audience that ‘this is not because you are fat, it is because you are a jerk, you see.’ That felt like a weird PC moment that didn’t quite belong in this slick and bloody action yarn - especially when you consider that the source material was a book about supervillains with absolutely no consequences to their evil actions. Then again, when the comic miniseries was optioned after one issue, one has to allow for some divergence. This is why the gang of killers thinks they’re in the right with their ‘kill one and save a thousand’ mantra. They never question the fact that their assignments are given to them by a metaphysical sewing machine.

But just when you’re thinking that you can’t deal with a movie where the magic driving force behind the action is an old-timey Bedazzler, this massive, elaborate gunfight sequence on a collapsing train happens and you’re sucked right back in. Watching Morgan Freeman be a jerk is a refreshing experience, too. Jolie is a withdrawn kind of hardass, single-minded in purpose, but with an occasional soft spot for the schmuck she’s stuck with training once he begins to flourish and stop being a crybaby whinebag so much.

Perhaps it helped to go in with low expectations, but damn, this movie just looks cool. In the summertime, sometimes cool is all you need.