Wanted Might Be the Ultimate Action Movie
Let's just get this out the way up top: Wanted is a bad movie. It looks terrible, like a Saw movie made by student filmmakers. It's gross and violent, and the acting ranges from "bad" to "Jesus Fuckin' Christ."
But I love it.
No movie is as unapologetically stupid as Wanted. It's borderline offensive in its treatment and view of humanity, but also here's a movie that, billed as an action-thriller, smuggles in some weird-ass superhero nonsense with the aim of being as entertaining as possible.
The plot, as if such a thing were to matter to this product of some galaxy-brain screenwriting, follows James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, a nervous wreck stuck in a dead-end job who discovers his "panic attacks" are in fact an innate ability to increase his heart rate to over 400 beats per minute, essentially slowing time and giving him superhuman reflexes and abilities. He joins an elite group of assassins known as the Fraternity. Their whole thing is they can curve bullets around obstacles, heal themselves super quickly, and generally fuck up targets in the most creative and unlikely ways possible. Led by Morgan Freeman's Sloan, The Fraternity's targets are determined by The Loom of Fate, in which names are derived from a secret code embedded in the fabric the loom produces. I'm not fucking with you, this is a movie that a studio spent $75 million on.
Under the watchful eye of Fox (Angelina Jolie), Wesley becomes a super-assassin, obsessed with hunting down a former Fraternity member who killed his father. Would you believe me if I told you there are a couple of shocking twists re: Wesley's parenthood? I know. Wanted keeps you on your toes in anticipating which cliché they're going to pull out of the storytelling bingo cage yet.
Wanted is an ugly, dumb, kind of tasteless movie that I nonetheless cackle with glee watching twice a year. If you've thought a movie was good but perhaps missing a scene in which Chris Pratt's face gets smashed with a computer keyboard and loose keys, flying slow-motion towards the camera, spell out "FUCK YOU" (that second "U" is one of Pratt's teeth) then, I good news for you at last.
