Wanted
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring:
James McAvoy - Wesley Gibson
Angelina Jolie - Fox
Morgan Freeman - Sloan
Terence Stamp - Pekwarsky
Thomas Kretschmann - Cross
Common - Gunsmith
Marc Warren - The Repairman
Dato Bakhtadze - The Butcher
Wanted is a film that's way more fun than it has any right to be. Based off the horrid Mark Millar comic of the same name, Wanted looks like a film that's trying way too hard to be cool, but with an irreverent style by director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) and a star-making performance by James McAvoy, Wanted ends up being one of the most fun films of the summer, rights be damned.
Wesley Gibson is living a life hand-crafted to mundane hell. He works a dead-end job under a tyrant of a boss, his girlfriend is cheating on him with his supposed "best-friend", and he basically feels a general sense of understandable worthlessness. Of course, then he wins a lottery of sorts by discovering that he's the son of a brilliant assassin and has untapped abilities like being able to shoot the wings off of flies and curving bullets around objects. At first this seems like it's going to be a superhero story where the hero doesn't have to work to master his abilities, but Bekmambetov and writers Michal Brandt, Derek Haas, and Chris Morgan are having too much fun making Wes' life miserable and his training regiment is one where he ends up working harder than Peter Parker or Tony Stark ever dreamed. How tough is the regiment? Well, if the secret Fraternity which takes Wesley under their wing didn't have regenerative baths of what looks like donut icing, he'd be dead about a hundred times over.
But Wes needs to have a delicate balance of being pathetic and inner-strength and James McAvoy pulls it off beautifully. I always knew that McAvoy could deliver a performance like this if he could just get the right role. Unfortunately, he was either stuck in over-rated crap like Chronicles of Narnia or Atonement or getting upstaged by performers with meatier roles like in the BBC miniseries State of Play or The Last King of Scotland. While he may be starring alongside big box-office draws like Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, McAvoy owns this film from the first to the final frame. This is partly due to his performance but also due to the film's one major weakness.
Despite being almost two hours long, Wanted is weak in the supporting character department. The trade-off is taking time for some fantastic set pieces rather than small character moments but there aren't any other real characters besides Wesley. The roles are cast but the characters are more jobs than people. Jolie is Fox, Wes' personal tutor; Freeman is Sloan, the Fraternity's bossman; raptor Common is Gunsmith (guess what he does).
But this one flaw doesn't undermine the loads of fun that Wanted provides and how it's the best hard-R action film since Crank.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
6.29.08