Movie Review: Wanted

3/10

There are good action films, there are great action films and there are superb action films.

Wanted is none of these.

The best action movies show heart, sophistication and originality. All three of these are sorely lacking in Wanted's strange Gun-Pornography based worldview.

This is a story which has a moral of "My life was crap till I started killing people" and even as a tongue in cheek condemnation of America's obsession with shooting white hot pieces of metal around it has been done before - remember that at the beginning of the Matrix, when Neo was stuck in a dead end office job in a cubicle? It's basically Xeroxed for the start of this movie.

Many movies require some form of suspension of disbelief to function, but this is just plain daft. This boring weedy loser is the son of a famous assassin who was part of the "fraternity", a society of Weavers (!) who can bend bullets round corners (!!) and get their targets from "the loom of fate" (!!!). He is brought in to catch his fathers killer and trained (in a montage, for god's sake!) to be rock hard and gun happy. Woo hoo!!! U S A! U S A!

Silly premise aside, is the film fun? Well, only in a truly braindead sort of way, there's lots of bangs and some fairly cool gadgets like a bullet that fires itself over miles and has "stages" like a moonrocket being the daft highlight. Thing is, it's utterly morally bankrupt - at one stage to catch this one target the protagonists cause a train crash which clealy kills hundreds of people with no remorse or even acknowledgement from the main characters who are too caught up in the hilariously obvious "twist" to care, and the script has no condemnation for such behaviour.

Add the woeful performance of Angelina (pouting is not always acting) Jolie to a completely miscast Morgan Freeman (who sounds like a friendly narrator even when using the F word) and James McAvoys vain attempts to find some depth in the plot or character and you really have a colossal waste of money on your hands. All of these actors are talented, and certainly can do better than this and should hang their heads in shame.

I didn't pay a penny to see this (my dear brother had rented it) and I am really grateful for that. I like the director, Timur Bekmambitov's earlier films, the impossible-to-follow-if-you-haven't-read-the-books Night Watch and Day Watch, The fantastic frazzled shining star of which, Konstanin Khabensky is wasted in a role that says nothing but "this creepy russian, isn't he funny?" Both of these films had tonnes of style, but they also had oodles of substance from their deep and fascinating source material to back them up.

Wanted has no substance. Aside from the side effects of an absurd budget there is no film here. Every action scene is far less interesting than the Matrix series it owes its inspiration to and the most spectactular set pieces are hilariously drawn out in super slo mo, kind of the opposite problem that Bond's latest outing has.

However, whereas Bond in Quantum of Solace is a character you care about and want to share a journey with, none of the characters in Wanted are sympathetic and none should be allowed to live on in any but their hideous memory forms.

I hope noone thinks this is a franchise. You could have five small scale Guillermo Del Toro horror films for this budget. Seriously. Spend the money on Chocolate or something. You'll have a better time.

A