Should be called “Un-asked For.”

Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, he of the diurnally titled “-Watch” duology, gives you CG car crashes and bullet-time bullet trajectories like you’ve never seen them before (unless you’ve seen The Matrix, Shoot Em Up, Crank, and Hitman).


Wanted is supposedly based on Mark Millar’s six-issue graphic novel, although its premise of a league of costumed supervillains who killed all the world’s superheroes and now rule the world in secret was ditched for being too comic-booky, and replaced with much more realistic elements like curving bullets, healing bacta tanks, looms that decree the fate of the world, and finding Angelina Jolie behind you in line at the pharmacy.

Gratingly one-note James McAvoy plays corporate drone Wesley Gibson, who’s such a loser that his name doesn’t get a single result on Google, a situation that remains unchanged even after he’s been involved in multiple high-profile homicides and a train crash where thousands are slain (don’t worry, all their names were probably sanctioned by the loom).

Apparently we’re supposed to sympathize with poor Wesley because a) his girlfriend is cheating on him and he does nothing about it except buy condoms, b) he’s an accountant, c) nobly quits his job only after finding out he’s got three mill in the bank, d) kills a man who just saved his life, e) kills a bunch of harmless rats that explode even though most of them aren’t wearing bombs on their backs from what we can see, and f) most of all at the end when he calls us all pathetic losers in voiceover for having paid money to watch his computer-generated antics for two hours. (shakes fist) Damn you, Wesley Gibson!


As for the supporting cast, Morgan Freeman has his usual thankless role as a wise sage. The movie primes you to expect a lot from his final scene since he’s been set up as a formidable shot and mastermind but I guess having Morgan Freeman doing Matrix-fu was too expensive. At least you get to hear him say “motherfucker,” which gets a bigger laugh than any of McAvoy’s whiny voiceovers.

Angelina Jolie and her Oscar-winning butt-crack are periodically on hand (or onscreen anyway) in the surreally sleek form of a sexy female assassin code-named “Fox” (see what they did there?) but not nearly as often as the trailers make it appear (a scene in the preview where she asks McAvoy if he’d like to bond isn’t in the movie at all, and it’s ultimately unclear whether she and McAvoy’s character even hook up or whether she’s simply teasing him, which tells you all you need to know about Bekmambetov’s approach to characterization). The brevity of these stagey cameos gets especially maddening when substituted with McAvoy bitching and moaning in almost every scene; it’s like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom if the focus had been on the Kate Capshaw character (McAvoy screams a lot like Capshaw). The movie drags when Jolie’s not around, which is all too often, and though her last scene ends with a novel send-off (and one of the very, very few bits not spoiled in the trailers or even here), it’s also a gyp to see all those other characters get punked so thriftily in the space of seconds. The whole third act lacks shape – McAvoy’s “plan”, gleaned from studying sketches his father made of exploding rats, hinges entirely on his arch-enemies not blowing him away on sight after he’s already annihilated 90% of their colleagues and a change in heart that at best paints Jolie’s character as a total enigma (she knows the identity of Cross but not its implications?).

Finally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the mystical concept of threads being spit out of a loom serving as binary code for the names (first and sur-) of people arbitrarily targeted for assassination, except for the whole lazy vagueness thing. If Fate is weaving this tapestry, what are the consequences when the pattern is violated or misread, which happens quite often by movie’s end? Is Fate benign; if so, why does it name Jolie? How did these weavers come into possession of the loom? How did they get their bullet-curving (and, before this, presumably their arrow- and rock-curving) powers to begin with? How did Fate operate before the invention of weaving? Do the opposition forces have rival looms? And if McAvoy acquired his powers through heredity (Jolie’s dad sure didn’t have them) and can shoot the wings off flies on day one, why does he need to “train”?

The answer is that he trains simply because that sequence is expected, along with an over-obvious third-act plot-“twist”, reaction shots of stupefied cops watching a car barrel-roll over their barricade, and of course the threat of an equally soulless, mechanical sequel (though the prospect of a Jolie-less continuation doesn’t exactly inspire enthusiasm).

But who knows. Maybe the sequel won’t feature master assassins hyper-perceptive enough to make bullets collide but totally unaware that they’re standing on a big stupid “X” their adversary made for no sensible reason other than our alleged benefit. Or are those the actual actors’ marks?