This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Action, Movie Reviews, NEW IN THEATER, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Kristen Hager, Chris Pratt
Well, the summer action season is here, and along with it, the promise of three months of high octane, low-intel action explosions that plug their gaping plot holes with expensive CGI and Dolby surround sound. Wanted made its way to the big screen as a comic book series, which explains the nonsensical plot and overdone action sequences which are becoming the all too typical style of today’s action features, and the end result is a yawning formula film.
James McAvoy’s character, Wesley starts out as a discontented office worker – aka Ed Norton’s Fight Club character, but his life takes a turn to the exciting when he is thrust into the midst of a violent war within a secret thousand year old fraternity of assassins, to which it turns out he was born to be part of. His sexy, but unconvincingly scrawny guide into this world is Fox, played by Angelina Jolie, who mostly just poses for the camera between comic book battles. Morgan Freeman is Sloan, the fraternity leader who monitors Wesley’s progress to determine when he is ready for his very special mission. The story strains credibility, but does manage a couple of decent surprises.
The action scenes of Wanted will remind viewers of pictures like Jumper mixed with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Jumper at least had an original premise but the ancient secret society of assassins is not original enough to carry this feature, but it should still pack enough punches and bullets to keep the action crowd happy for a couple of hours.
