‘WANTED” is like a 12-armed heavy-metal drummer after a case of Red Bull, flailing and thundering through two hours of impossible action.
“Fight Club” and “The Matrix” smash into each other in midair in a comic-book extravaganza about a meek office drone (James McAvoy) who gets taken in, beaten down and bloodied up by a gang of brilliant assassins led by Angelina Jolie. Her name is Fox, naturally, and she explains to McAvoy’s Wesley Gibson – an accountant so anonymous that Googling himself yields nothing – that his father was a master killer rubbed out in a war involving a secret fraternity of assassin/weavers that goes back 1,000 years.Badass weavers? Yup, and the gang, led by a toughened-up Morgan Freeman as Sloan, want Wes to go after his father’s killer and restore the balance of power in the universe.
Subtle dialogue and smarts are not on hand; three of the big applause lines are “Go f – – – yourself,” “F – – – you” and “Kill this motherf – – – er,” which is, however, kinda cool, if only because Freeman himself says them. (Finally! In your face, Miss Daisy!) But what “Wanted” offers is what the audience craves: a stunt sundae with stunt sauce on the side and a side order of stunts. Staged at a ferocious pace and on a gigantic scale by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian director of “Night Watch,” the action comes close to setting a new standard.
In rescuing Wes from the killer, Fox scoops him up in her Viper while moving sideways at about 70 mph. She then tears off under the El trains of Chicago laid flat-out on her back on the hood of her car firing at the guy chasing her.
This is the car chase scene of the year so far, and the movie has a lot more rounds left in its clip, including a rousing train-smashing scene in Europe. Even a throwaway bit about shooting a tycoon inside his bulletproof limo is handled with wild wit: The guy can only be shot through his sunroof, which means the assassin’s car has to flip sideways over it. This movie’s got some wow.
Wes’s training montage is brutal and bloody. His first lesson is how to take a beating while being tied down (reminiscent of the masochistic, cleansing violence of “Fight Club”) and then he submits meekly to being carved up by a mad butcher. Fox also tries to teach him how to surf trains and he takes a clobbering no one could survive but Wile E. Coyote. But – ingenious move – all of this bodily trauma can be reversed by a magical restorative bath that heals all bruises and instantly knits together shattered bones. (Questions that needs answering: What are the limits to the bath? Can anyone with access to it ever die?)
Making heavy use of “Matrix” bullet-time slo-mo – as well as that movie’s central idea of an ongoing ancient war none of us squares take much notice of – “Wanted” makes brash new advances in stunts, many of which are bound to be imitated. Want to fire bullets that swerve around the person you don’t want to hit so they can rip into the guy behind him? No problem, thanks to a bend-it-like-Beckham arm technique that gives the bullets topspin. As for the old quandary of how to keep the hero stocked up on bullets even as dozens of cartridges are emptied, “Wanted” makes the solution look easy: Kill battalions of enemies while moving so fast that you pick up their dropped weapons before they hit the ground.
Silly stuff, but you have to admire the demon joy with which it’s all done. Even the “Fight Club”-style one-liners about the fluorescent void of cubicle work (possibly the two movies are the only action flicks to mention IKEA), though lacking in wit, capture something primeval about the leashed fury of the proletarian office male. It’s a cunning idea to link “Office Space”-style hell to the comic-book fantasy that within the pimpled adolescent lies a hero’s DNA. “Wanted” looks like the launching pad of a major franchise and a Michael Bay-size Hollywood career for Bekmambetov.