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Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted

by Kathryn Durfee
07/01/2008

In the opening scene of Wanted, a man in business attire runs down a hallway at the top of an office building and bursts through a plate-glass window, leaping across to another rooftop in a shower of glass. This Matrix-style scene is only the first of many, giving the audience a taste of all of high-intensity action sequences to come. However, with all of the over-the-top violence and non-stop action, Wanted disappoints with the lack of a strong script or intriguing story.

Wanted is Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov's first venture into American cinema. Best known for his Russian sci-fi vampire thrillers Day Watch and Night Watch, based on a fantasy trilogy by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko, Bekmambetov seems the perfect director to tackle the film based on comic book mini-series Wanted by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. The film is part origin story, part revenge flick, and part drama. If only all of these parts had combined to make a memorable whole.

Twenty-five-year-old Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) begins the film by complaining that he feels nothing but suffers frequent panic attacks that send his heart racing and blood pulsing. He is cubicle-bound in a dead-end accounting job, his boss is a bitch, his fratboyish best friend is sleeping with his girlfriend, and his apartment is a dump. Even though he is clearly unsatisfied, he does not care enough to change his situation.

His humdrum existence is turned upside down when the beautiful and deadly Fox (Angelina Jolie) appears and tells him that she was sent to protect him from Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), a rogue assassin who killed his father (the airborne gentleman from the first sequence). The point at which Fox screams by in a red sports car, does a 360-degree turn, and scoops Wesley into the passenger seat without even touching the break pedal is when you, the viewer, must make a choice. Do you go along with the ride or complain about the lack of physics and grumble about the $8.50 you just spent on the ticket?

Gibson is recruited into the "Fraternity," a 1,000-year-old secret society of assassins led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Since it's Morgan Freeman, we immediately trust him, believing his claims that the names revealed in the fabric made by the Loom of Fate (woven in binary, of course) are bad people who must be killed. As a member of the Fraternity, Gibson learns to bend bullets, dart across the tops of trains, and shoot the wings off of flies. He leaves the world of sheep to become a wolf, but does he really understand what he's getting himself into?

Written by Micahel Brandt and Derek Haas, the same team behind the recent remake of 3:10 To Yuma, Wanted could have and should have been so much better. The characters in Wesley's pre-Fraternity life lack dimension and motivation. They might as well have been portrayed by those cardboard cut-outs that stand in the windows of comic book shops. The script is weak and rough, and until Fox appeared in all of her tattooed and charcoal-eyed glory, I feared the worst. Luckily, there aren't too many dialogue-heavy scenes here.

However, even with a lackluster script, Wanted is, at parts, undeniably badass and a triumph of post-production and special effects. Possessing what must be only a handful of non-CGI shots, the film impresses, stuns, invigorates, and most importantly, entertains. The camera follows intricately-designed bullets through impossible trajectories and cars are jumped and flipped like Matchbox toys. In turn, though, the viewer must question the necessity of some of the stunts - is shooting a man from the roof of a speeding train really the best plan? Must Fox perform hip-cracking yoga in order to fit under the tunnel? And, now that I think about it, what made these ancient weavers decide to become trained killers? And what's with all the fast motion and slow motion? Can't we just let this play out in real time? But for every question that popped into my head, I immediately thought, "Oh, never mind."

The first half of the film is an origin story and a fantastic one at that. I'm quite sure that anyone would follow and believe Angelina Jolie, especially after she shoots out the windshield, slides out onto the hood of the car, and straddles you while she fires at the car behind you, but the following sequence of Gibson's training and transformation from account manager to instinctive assassin is tight, effective, and extremely well done. It's in the second half of the film that the action gives new meaning to the world "ridiculous" and the plot falls apart. Gibson learns the truth behind the Fraternity's motives, but by this point, the story has gone so far off the track that it doesn't matter anymore and you just kind of have to go with it.

Instead, we're forced to drool at the bloody violence and impossible action. A train full of innocent passengers careens off of a bridge and plummets into the abyss between two mountains, but never mind the consequences. Somehow, the two people we need to care about have survived, so who cares about the others? And in a final one-man-against-many (just how many people are there in this Fraternity?) battle, Gibson fires repeatedly through the gaping hole he has just blown in the skull of a former comrade, proving that Bekmambetov has studied up on his Tarantino and Wachowski brothers.

As Gibson, the Scottish-born James McAvoy, who has dazzled in dramas The Last King of Scotland and Atonement, makes his grand entrance into the action film genre. He plays both of Gibson's personas (pre- and post-Fraternity) with skill, looking downtrodden and hopeless in a shirt and tie beneath a windbreaker and tough and powerful in a leather jacket and wielding a gun. He takes on the emotional depth of Gibson's character with all of the care he gave to previous, more emotionally-demanding roles; if only he had a better script to work with. Jolie shines as the sly but believable Fox; this is Mrs. Smith taken to the next level. Looking at her past roles, it's no great surprise that Jolie can kick ass and look amazing doing it, but with Wanted she also incorporates the emotion and depth typically saved for pieces like Changeling and A Mighty Heart. She is a piece of the Fraternity machine, but that does not mean that she follows orders mindlessly.

Overall, Wanted is the sort of film that is meant to set up a franchise. Comic books, video games and movies are all merging into one big monster with sights set on the consumer market, and though Wanted sets up the sort of story - the apathetic nobody finds his inner strength and becomes a powerful hero - that makes for great characters with dimension and moral challenges, it unfortunately trades intrigue and depth for adrenaline-packed action and relentlessly bloody violence.

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