Wanted Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 06.29.2008

The director of Night Watch and Day Watch brings us an action film that's more then just Angelina Jolie looking hot and killing people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Written by: Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, & Chris Morgan

Starring:
James McAvoy - Wesley Gibson
Angelina Jolie - Fox
Morgan Freeman - Sloan
Thomas Kretschmann - Cross
Common - The Gunsmith
Marc Warren - The Repairman
John Carmichael - The Butcher
Konstantin Khabensky - The Exterminator
Terence Stamp - Pekwarsky
David O'Hara - Mr. X
Chris Pratt - Barry
Kristen Hager - Cathy



Running Time: 110 minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexuality

Of all of the new crop of directors working in Hollywood, few are as well-known or well-received as Timur Bekmambetov. The Russian film-maker, who first became known for an award-winning series of commercials in his native country, broke through into movie-goer’s consciousness with 2004’s Nochnoi Dozor, better known to American audiences as Night Watch. With a $4.2 million budget, Bekmambetov took the modern dark fantasy story based on a Russian novel and both wrote and directed it into a film that looked like it could compete with Hollywood blockbusters. The critically-loved movie became the most successful Russian film of all time, and got some brief attention in the United States before finding an audience on DVD. A sequel, Day Watch, followed, offering up much more of the same, again to much success. Of course, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood studios came calling, and when they did, it was for another literary adaptation: Wanted. Based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar, Wanted has become the test to see what the talented Russian film-maker can do with a big studio blockbuster.

The film focuses on Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), an account manager at a firm of an unknown office nature. He’s called an account manager, he tells us, because someone in human resources said they should be managing their customers and not servicing them. Thus, he’s really just an entry-level nobody in a job no one cares about, with a big of a boss that no one at all likes. He takes anxiety medication to avoid attacks, and is fully aware that his best friend and cube neighbor is having an affair with the girlfriend he can’t stand. When he takes money out of the ATM, he imagines it insulting him. He is, in the simplest terms, a man who considers himself a loser, stuck in a life he doesn’t want and yet can’t escape, set ingeniously to Nine Inch Nails’s “Every Day is Exactly the Same.” Lucky for him, as he finds out, he’s also the son of an assassin, one of the greatest who ever lived. The woman who tells him this shows up at his side while he’s buying his weekly medication. Her name is Fox (Jolie), and from the moment Wesley meets her, his life goes from buying the condoms used to cheat on him with and gasping for breath while his boss yells at him to dodging gunfire and holding a steering wheel while Fox leans out the front of the car to shoot at the person behind them that wants to kill Wesley. She takes him to a textile factory, where he meets, among other people, Sloan (Freeman). Sloan tells Wesley that he has the ability to control his adrenaline and accomplish impossible feats, and asks him to join the Fraternity, a millennia-old organization of assassins with the same ability. Wesley’s father was part of the Fraternity, he is told, and they need him to kill Cross (Kretschmann) the man who killed his father. Upon agreeing, Wesley is plunged into a world of brutal training overseen by Fox to prepare him for the inevitable showdown. This includes missions to get him ready, assassinations dictated by an artifact known as the Loom of Fate, which tells in threads and fibers who needs to die without telling why. Along the way, Wesley is forced to discover who he is and what his real purpose in his life is—essentially, he must find and choose his own destiny.

To say that Wanted is an over-the-top action film is to make a gross understatement and generalization. One might as well say that Iron Man was a comic book movie success; it’s correct, but it hardly does the truth any amount of justice. “Over the top” doesn’t even begin to describe the action we see in this movie. From the opening scene, where the man we’re later told is Wesley’s father leaps through the glass side of a building to take out several assassins shooting at him from across the street, we know that the laws of physics will not be applying. And from cars that flip over and land right side up, sniper shots from miles away through buildings and other obstacles, cars going airborne to smash through the sides of trains and more, Wanted’s action is undeniably removed from reality. As long as one can accept the premise of the film however, the insanity of the action is easy to enjoy. There can be an easy comparison made to The Matrix, although Bekmambetov’s film has many things that that film series lacked. Whereas the Wachowskis took a great idea and made it innovative enough that their script’s flaws could be ignored, Wanted takes it a step further and tries to eliminate the flaws. Screenwriters Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, the team who wrote last year’s incredible 3:10 to Yuma, create a script that, while it twists and turns, manages to create some very convincing dialogue at the same time. The plot structure is slightly uneven in parts, but it’s consistently made up for by nuances in the script and a general avoidance of the standard Hollywood action tropes. Only one major twist is thrown at us that seems clichéd, a late second-act discovery that turns Wesley’s world on its ear.

Much of the look of the film carries Timur’s signature all over it. He has an incredible ability to convey cool without turning it hokey; to take over-the-top action and not make you scoff. He did it in the Night Watch films, and he does it here too. To call the movie incredibly stylistic is an understatement. It carries a Fight Club sensibility in the first act, as Wesley yearns to break out of the office drone life he hates and is trapped by. Once the action starts, it smoothly blends into an insane adrenaline-fest, punctuated by periods of discovery and exclamation marks of brutal violence. Working with cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, Bekmambetov captures bullet wounds, broken bones, punches and knife slices with vicious honesty. While it’s slick in many places that Night Watch and Day Watch feel grittier and more real—a choice that doesn’t truly help the already fantastically-oriented film—Bekmambetov still manages to make it seem more real than many other Hollywood blockbusters. You can see much of Night Watch in the film—the complicated father-son relationships, the off-the-charts car action, the skillfully-choreographed gunplay—but with a bigger budget, Bekmambetov is able to amp things up and blow away films made on two to three times Wanted’s budget.

Along the way, he’s aided in this by some great acting. James McAvoy, who’s built his dramatic reputation with critically-acclaimed turns in Academy Award-nominated films such as The Last King of Scotland and Atonement, is brilliantly cast as the eyes of the audience in Wesley. It’s a difficult role to pull off, starting off as geeky and weak but transitioning into a strong, take-charge force. Luckily, McAvoy’s charm carries us through the journey in a believable manner. He commits himself to Wesley in a very real way, and he’s as adept at playing off the panic attacks while his boss Janice snaps a stapler at him as he is bursting through a window, guns blazing to cut down scores of people. This is McAvoy’s star-making role, the one that will either make him as a commodity in the movie business or break him, and he holds up very admirably under the pressure. Opposite him is the lovely Angelina Jolie, who’s never been sexier than she is here as Fox. Fox is a character who could be so cool as to be a caricature. She’s hot, she kicks ass, she hangs out of cars with guns and wears leather and tattoos with the best of them. Jolie is clearly having as much fun here as she ever has, and performs what is perhaps the most difficult part of the film: she helps McAvoy carry off the believability that the Wesley/Fox dynamic makes sense and works. Reportedly, Jolie asked for the script to be changed—not to give her more screen time or words, but to cut lines of dialogue so she could emote the performance, not word it out. The decision works incredibly well, and Jolie’s roguish poise makes Fox a joy of a character to behold. In the major supporting roles, Morgan Freeman and Terence Stamp are solid as the puppet master Sloan and the rogue bullet-maker Pekwarsky, respectively. Freeman is able to lend a more vicious undertone to his usual distinguished performance, and Stamp channels some of his best performances from the past in a role with little screen time, but a lot of significance.

Things become a bit of a mess in the third act, as Wesley discovers that the person he is, isn’t the person he thought he was becoming. It bogs down briefly before exploding into a kinetically-charged action climax. In the end, the question of whom Wesley is—who we all are—is what drives Wanted. As Wesley looks from a sniper rifle to the camera and asks the audience “What have you done lately?”, it drives home the point of the film, as strongly as any bullet drives through the head of the bad (or good) guys.

The 411: Fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled, and exaggerated violence is hardly all that Russian director Timur Bekmambetov has to offer with his Hollywood debut, Wanted. Featuring high-quality performances all around and Bekmambetov stylized sensibilities, it's a brutal yet enjoyable film with a story of a man's self-discovery amidst the bullet casings flying and the heads exploding. In a star-making turn, James McAvoy blows away any doubt that he's a box office commodity and acting force to be reckoned with, and Angelina Jolie does her damnedest to help the story along. As long as one can suspend their disbelief enough to accept the premise and isn't too grossed out by the fairly explicit violence, Wanted makes for an action film to be enjoyed among the best of them.

Final Score:  8.5   [ Very Good ]