2008: Wanted

Wanted (Bekmambetov, 2008) 7/10

Corporate drone Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is tired and unwell. Life has left him jaded and stressed. Chained to a safety-net of anti-anxiety prescription pills and lacking in self-confidence, Wesley is unable to cope with the stresses and disappointments of his intangible accounting position at a Chicago financial company.

Enveloped in the myriad of failures within his life, Wesley is unable to defend himself from neither the criticisms of his overweight boss, his nagging girlfriend, nor the latter's utilization of an IKEA table as a prop for sexual encounters with his supposed best friend and co-worker Barry (Chris Pratt). His tattered, dog-eared self-help paperback offers little aid or comfort either. With his frequent apologies, Wesley is Back To The Future's Marty McFly sans the social awkwardness.

Queueing up for his latest prescription refill in a local supermarket, Wesley encounters a mysterious woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). Fox tells Wesley that his father, a former assassin was recently murdered by a man named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), the latter who just happens to be aiming another barrage of bullets at the pair. After fleeing through downtown Chicago, Wesley is introduced to other members of a clandestine group named The Fraternity.

Heading this organization is a man named Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the owner of a large textile plant. Sloan informs Wesley that not only was his father a member of this ancient society, but that it is Wesley's destiny to enlist in The Fraternity; thus providing meaning to Wesley's blank and unimportant life.Through a series of training sessions involving torturous beatings and unorthodox weapons instruction, the covert faction attempt to utilize Wesley's panic attacks to his advantage and hone their raw pupil into an assassin capable of defeating his father's killer.

With its simplistic plot about a disaffected corporate minion and over-the-top violence, Wanted has been compared to films such as Fight Club and The Matrix. Yet, unlike either of those films Wanted lacks structural inventiveness or philosophical inquisitiveness. In fact, it even lacks a plausible narrative. Built upon a flimsy mythology centered around the works and folklore of a latent group with its origins in pre-modern Moravian textile weaving, Wanted is seemingly ridiculous at face-value, particularly in regard to the film's prophetic loom machine.

However, the driving force of Wanted is not to be found in its story, but rather in its high-octane imagery drenched in adrenalin. This is an action picture which delivers all it promises in terms of pace and delivery. While Wanted lacks the substance of The Bourne Series or Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, it certainly offers greater thrills and excitement than other recent and feted Hollywood action films such as Doug Liman's stale Mr and Mrs. Smith or the cache of recent Marvel comic adaptations.

Preferring a pulse to a social conscience, Wanted is certainly thematically questionable in its ideas of control and experiential fulfillment through violence. Lacking any real sense of identity, Wesley finds opportunity and self-gratification through his work with The Fraternity. Additionally, in discovering his father's hidden past, Wesley achieves a measure of control of his previously unsatisfying regimented life. Dominion through chaos and destruction thus becomes the order of the day, as Wesley achieves the power and respect his ordinary day job fails to offer.

Yet, Wesley is no Walter Mitty or Billy Liar. His revenge fantasies are fulfilled through the hypnotic surreal world he enters, which gives him a sense of belief previously absent in his soul. Played with sarcasm and anxiousness by James McAvoy, the young Scottish actor brilliantly manages to breathe a sense of realism and humour into his character's beleaguered and jittery Everyman. McAvoy is also aided by a stately calm effort by Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie's ability to morph into a hyper-sexualized video-game vixen with miniscule effort.

However, the real star of the proceedings is Bekmambetov. The director's telescopic, hyper-kinetic approach results in a universe of surreal absurdities that never unravel in large part due to Bekmambetov's ability to convince his audience of the plausible nature of this action-packed nonsense in which assassins work from elevated trains, fall down canyon shafts relatively unscathed and drive decaying Eastern European compact cars onto speeding passenger trains. In Wanted, logic is not only suspended, but has also been successfully eradicated at the hands of an overtly visual pyromaniac.

Wanted is a fast-paced, stylish, jarring, teenage joyride of a film: an emotionally stunted picture lacking in sensitivity, maturity or a basic adherence to the laws of physics. The absence of the latter however is not a major loss, as Russian director Timur Bekmambetov places style over substance to create a CGI-intensive, ultra-violent action flick that spares few victims along the way. Wanted may not have a complex intellect, an original story line or anything beyond a fleeting buzz, but it has an abundance of sexy thrills, stunts and visual gimmicks to render the film surprisingly enjoyable and visually satisfying.

* Wanted is released by Universal

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque