Critique: Film> Reviews.

If ever there is a time when a new warning for films needs to be introduced, it is now- "Wanted: Contains extreme acid trip, and may cause you to vomit from sheer excitement." I'm not kidding either. I thought I'd seen pretty much everything action films had to offer, but the sheer unintelligible insanity of this comic book adaptation took things to a whole new other level. Fair enough, there is much more than a pinch of both Fight Club and The Matrix in this, but before I even had the time to dwell on how many films set the groundwork the bullets, bodies, cars, and even trains start flying. Picasso didn't create a work of art without any inspiration, you know?

Ok, so maybe I'm getting a little carried away, but action, as you're probably already aware, does crazy things to me. I haven't been this excited about a movie since Rocky Balboa two whole years ago, and even that came with a nostalgia tag. With Wanted, however, I've never even heard of the comic books, never mind bothered to "read" them, so I had no idea what to expect.

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), much like Norton's character in Fight Club, works at a dead-end job, gets no respect from his boss, suffers regularly from panic attacks, and has a so-called best friend that sleeps with his girlfriend. He soon meets up with a mysterious woman named conveniently named "Fox" (Angelina Jolie, of course) in the local pharmacy, who belongs to the Fraternity of Assassins, and things start getting messy.

Gibson is taken to the Fraternity's headquarters where he meets Sloan (Morgan Freeman), and trains to be one of the assassins, with the idea to eventually kill an opposing assassin named "Cross", who was apparently responsible for killing his father.

Aside from the usual slow motion gun fights, which seem to be a typical feature of contemporary action films, the director Bekmambetov brings a bizarre and often morbid take to violence; bullets curve, spears are blocked with gun barrels, and Gibson's "best friend" gets hit with a keyboard with the loose keys spelling out profanity in mid-flight. There's even a moment where one of the bad guys gets shot at point black range in the eye, and Gibson continues to shoot at further enemies with the gun stuck there; thus, using his body as a human shield. It really is quite brutal stuff, in a cartoonish sort of way.

You'd hardly think that McAvoy was a tough guy after seeing him for the first time, but hilarity is all part of the movie's charm. Rather, Jolie and Freeman are the menacing ones in their roles; of the two though, which would you rather hang off the bonnet of a car at full speed with their legs in full view of your face, firing a shotgun? I ask both men and women this question because I'm pretty confident that their answers will be identical. That's just another one of the reasons to watch Wanted.

Is that even legal? In Wanted it is my friend.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2008.