Wanted (***)

Slick action is the draw in this first big-budget American effort from director Timur Bekmambetov, whose Night Watch and Day Watch became Russia’s all-time highest-grossing movies. (A third film in the vampire/sci-fi series may be filmed in English.) Those movies showed he had a way with visually arresting action sequences and special effects, if not necessarily in crafting a coherent story. Here he adapts a script from Derek Haas and Michael Brandt (3:10 to Yuma, Catch That Kid, 2 Fast 2 Furious) with elements familiar from movies like The Matrix and V for Vendetta, only with fewer pretentions to significance, and less of a sci-fi angle. In other words, it’s a solid action movie with a ridiculous yet intriguing plot in which a regular person (James McAvoy) turns into an action hero via the time-honored technique of having the crap beat of him.

McAvoy plays an office drone who learns that his absentee father was an assassin for a secret “Fraternity” who go around killing people so the world will all be balanced or some such nonsense. He doesn’t know it, but he’s inherited his dad’s physical gifts, which explains why they want him to help finger the traitor in their midst. These gifts include the art of shooting bullets around corners, slowing time, and other such things that make no sense but make for cool effects. Angelina Jolie plays the bad-ass chick who gets to train him in this unfamiliar skill set, mostly by, like I said, beating the crap out of him. Morgan Freeman also shows up as—guess what—the all-powerful head of the organization. Because the first ten minutes of the movie have deeply impressed on us what an unhappy loser our hero currently is (complete with quick-cut snippets of his girlfriend getting pounded on the kitchen table by his best pal), the idea is that he now feels alive for the first time. (See also Fight Club.) Whatever. The chase sequence where the Jolie character does a controlled flip of her vehicle will almost be worth the price of admission for action junkies. Bekmambetov’s ostentatious, slam-bam quick-cut style makes literal believability beside the point. Visual panache is what he’s going for, and a video-game momentum. Ultimately, it’s an empty exercise, and the plot twist is basically familiar, but for what it is, Wanted is exactly that.

IMDB link

viewed 6/28/05 and 7/5/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 8/9/08