Wanted

This gun you're holding belonged to your father, he could conduct a symphony orchestra with it.

I like Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted, but it isn’t a very smart film. In some ways, it resembles a superstar athlete whom you’ll gladly watch play but prefer not to hear speak. Enjoyable, admirably aggressive, and often very funny, it works even as it gets lost in its own absurdist storyline. I wish it were a bit more shrewd about juggling all the disparate elements it throws into the air — goofy mysticism, outrageous violence, hero archetypes, et al. — but as an action film it has a raw power, and a geeky appeal.

My favorite thing about Wanted, I think, is the way it positions itself — sometimes — as being about the battle against mediocrity. Its protagonist, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy, slipping effortlessly into the action hero role and somewhat more laboriously into an American accent), is an accountant who’s begging from a respite from his miserably unremarkable existence when he’s recruited into a legendary fraternity of assassins, who tell him he has an extraordinary gift for bloody mayhem. You see, what he thought were intense panic attacks, were actually moments of intense focus, during which he can do incredible things like shoot the wings off a fly, or curve bullets with pinpoint precision.

The assassins, led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and his underling Fox (Angelina Jolie), do the work of the “Loom of Fate,” a device almost too ridiculous to describe. Almost: apparently operating under its own power, it spits out the encoded names of assassination targets, which Sloan interprets and assigns to the team. These are the people that fate has determined must die, and we get the sense that if they don’t, something very, very bad will happen. The assassins do the work of fate – even when the Loom spits out a name of one of their own. Wesley is particularly important because a rogue assassin (Thomas Kretschmann) has splintered from the group, killed Wesley’s father, and is targeting Wesley next.

Casting McAvoy in this role may have seemed odd, but it’s perfect because of the amount of time Wanted dedicates to watching the hero assassin emerge from his nerdy accountant shell. Wesley narrates the film, his voiceover going from self-deprecating to profanely bombastic as the plot progresses, and I found his transformation — and his own astonishment at what he’s capable of — to be moving. There’s a wonderful moment after he tells off his boss and smashes his scummy best friend in the face with a keyboard, when he stands outside his office, stunned and immobilized, amazed at what he just did and bewildered by the possibilities. Then, of course, Jolie — absolutely perfect in a role tailor-made for the actress — picks him up in her gleaming black SUV, and we’re off to the races.

To the extent Wanted engages in worldbuilding, its world is contained entirely inside Timur Bekmambetov’s visual style — which, in turn, is imported wholesale from Night Watch and Day Watch, the Russian fantasy films that got him attention. If the film’s settings and production design seem run of the mill by summer blockbuster standards, Bekmambetov’s direction is downright opulent: he has a fondness for “impossible” trick camerawork, rampant de- and acceleration, and violence that is both cartoonishly graphic and hyperrealistic to the extent that we can even envision what a bullet penetrating a skull in slow motion would “realistically” look like. The style is always aggressive and almost never elegant — I wished Bekmambetov had as tight a handle on ordinary editing as on the fancy visual fireworks — but it’s undeniably distinctive, and it works for what Wanted is trying to accomplish.

If there’s a problem it’s with the plot and the tone. The film is simultaneously very goofy and self-serious, which would be fine except that it doesn’t have the confidence and internal consistency to get us through entirely unscathed. It rarely seems 100% sold on its own premise — there really should have been more awe and amazement surrounding the freakin’ Loom of Fate — and the late-film plot twists seem kind of half-hearted, almost as if Bekmambetov doesn’t even expect us to be all that surprised.

That said, the ending strikes precisely the right note, even though — or perhaps because — it threatens to cross over from escapist entertainment to harangue. Wanted ultimately seems more sincere about its quasi-inspirational, do-something-with-your-life ambitions than about its plot. Summer ’08 has been full of decent, largely predictable rollercoaster rides, but here’s one that’s a little off-kilter, and kind of unique.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2008
Starring:	Common, Marc Warren, Konstantin Khabensky, Thomas Kretschmann, James McAvoy, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman
Directed by:	Timur Bekmambetov
Rated:	R