Wanted (27 June 2008)
directed by Timur Bekmambetov
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Common, Kristen Hager, Marc Warren, David O'Hara, Konstantin Khabensky, Dato Bakhtadze, Chriss Pratt, Lorna Scott
|
MPAA rating: Studio: Spyglass Entertainment, Relativity Media, Kickstart Productions, Universal Pictures, Stillking Films, Marc Platt Productions Script: Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, Chris Morgan Based on the book by: Mark Millar, J. G. Jones Music: Danny Elfman Running time: 110 minutes Tags: Action; assassins; blood; comic-book adaptation; explosions; guilds; knives; pistols; rats; revenge; rifles; Thriller; weavers Tactical strength: [8/10]
|
for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexuality
About a thousand years ago, a guild of weavers discovered that the seemingly random flaws in their fabric encoded the names of individuals who would do more harm than good if left alive. So the weavers also trained themselves as assassins -- not killers for hire, rather killers assigned by fate to remove undesirable persons. We don't get any explanation why the weavers never killed Adolph Hitler orIdi Amin. The weavers would just say that fate just didn't call for their assassination.
In the present day, one of the guild's assassins has gone rogue and started killing the members of the guild. To remedy the situation, the guild recruits Wesley Gibson (JamesMcAvoy -- yes, sweet Mr. Tumnis from The Chronicles of Narnia), the son of one of the recently murdered weavers. Wesley has no idea about his heritage and works as a very lowly accountant in a cubical farm managed by a fat, sadistic woman (Lorna Scott). Due to severe anxiety attacks, it seems like Wesley fills a prescription of anti-anxiety medication every day.
During one such trip to the pharmacy, a mysterious woman (Angelina Jolie) saves him from an attack by the rogue assassin. She takes him to a meeting with several tough characters, where a man called Sloan (Morgan Freeman) hands Wesley a gun and demands that he shoot the wings off some flies. Wesley finds the request insane, but when one of the men puts a gun to Wesley's head, he starts to have an anxiety attack and manages to shoot the wings off three files.
Sloan explains that Wesley doesn't have anxiety. Instead, the weavers have bread themselves to have episodes of heightened reaction time and increased adrenaline production. The weavers also have some quite unique long-range bullets and the ability to curve bullets into non-linear trajectories -- a fancy way of saying they can shoot around corners. Sloan tells Wesley that the weavers need him to take out the rogue, that only Wesley has the reaction time needed to kill such a skilled professional assassin.
Wesley doesn't at first join the weavers, but just one more day at his meaningless job he returns to the weavers ready to train. And his training includes sessions of getting beat up, slashed with knives, and trained to curve bullet trajectories. Fortunately for Wesley, the weavers also have tanks filled with a solution that speeds healing, so he can continue getting beat up day after day with the idea that he will eventually learn to control his heightened reaction time and call upon it when needed. Eventually, Wesley emerges from the training as a lethal killing machine, ready for the assignments Sloan hands out from the loom of fate.
I had never heard of the comic series Wanted, but from the opening scenes of the film, I could tell that I was watching a comic adaptation. I don't know how much detail the comics gave to the blood and gore, but the film seems to use blood as it's primary medium. We see more of Wesley's blood than anyoneelse's blood, and I doubt that more than five minutes passes without some large quantity of blood splashing across the screen. I wouldn't call the gore gratuitous though. Creating superhuman assassins clearly requires extensive, bloody training.
The plot follows pretty typical lines of the normal boy who finds out he has some unusual heritage -- think Harry Potter, but with school condensed down to a few weeks. The boy learns about his heritage, has a rough transition period into his inherited role, and must somehow use his new skills to defeat the evil that threatens his inherited lifestyle. Usually much of the plot centers on the character learning about the new world he has joined, and Wanted follows that path. Over half of the film centers on Wesley training to take his place in the guild of assassins. Wesley doesn't have much fun training, but the film moves the story along with a nice combination of explosions, rapid-fire gunfights, chase scenes, and the discovery of cool and interesting things about the weavers' heritage and skills. You don't get a lot of deep thought out of Wanted, but you do get a fun, adolescent romp filled with plenty of action.
Related Item from Amazon.com
  Trade paperback |
