Lyzsi Sinclair(un)Wanted
Wanted
Wanted, the latest big-budget no-brainer from Hollywood, is about some guy that hates his job in an office but then Angelina Jolie comes in and tells him he is really a super-assassin only he doesn't know it and then stuff starts blowing up for no good reason and then...
Oh, sorry. I nodded off there for a moment. Yes, that is actually the plot, and yes, it is as bad as it sounds. The new film from Russian director Timbuktoo or something like that (he did the Nightwatch movies, which apparently did not suck) features young Scot James McAvoy (he was awesome in that British TV show Shameless, and not too bad in Atonement, where he got to feel up Keira Knightley but then died rather horribly) and the aformentioned Ms Jolie. It also has Morgan Freeman (does he really need the money or something) and a collection of faces that don't really require names but you get distracted wondering where you saw them before.
Distraction is the name of the game, here. The film is so bereft of anything new, exciting or even intelligent that the viewer (OK, I) had to entertain myself by trying to figure out if the ostensible bad guy was the same one as in an episode of CSI that was repeated recently.
OK, plot summary (not that you will see it, but in case you were wondering) has sad office loser Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) find out that his long-lost dad was a big bad assassin who could bend bullets around obstacles. Fox (Angelina Jolie) tells him this in a convenience store before the Bad Guy comes in and tries to blow all and sundry away. Wesley and Fox escape, then Wesley finds out he can bend bullets as well, and all he has to do is stand up to excruciating and sickly violent punishment involving bare fists, elbows, feet and knives (all lovingly depicted for our viewing pleasure) which is repeated ad nauseum.
Freeman stands around being all avuncular and explaining that the assassins get their intended targets from a loom (yes, a loom) where the pattern of the weave is determined as a code that tells him who needs to die next. Well, getting the targets from an Oracle had been done, I guess.
Unbelievably, this is not the most ridiculous thing the movie has to offer, but we don't have to wait long for that, when we get a set-piece where a train comes off the rails over an impossibly deep culvert. The train is full, which would mean that several hundred people fall to their deaths or are crushed in the most horrific way, but who cares! The real important and heartbreaking bit is that Wesley has just found out his dad that he never met is not really his dad and the man that he thought was trying to kill him really was his dad and is therefore not a Bad Guy, but a Nice Guy. Only he just killed the new dad cos he thought new dad was trying to kill him. Bummer. Music swells, we are supposed to feel bad.
But not for too long, cos we know that Wesley is about to recover from this emotional shock and then go on a murderous rampage and kill everybody responsible for telling him fibs. Yay!
In between times, there are other things that will keep 13-year-old boys entertained, such as the sight of Ms Jolie's well-formed naked bottom and the unintentionally hilarious note hit when Freeman uncomfortably delivers a line containing the word 'motherfucker.' Otherwise, McAvoy is wasted (and when he takes his shirt off to reveal the requisite super-buffed chest, he just looks wrong), Jolie smirks her way through the film looking bored (I know how she feels) and the whole thing feels like it was put together by a bunch of immature geeks who had a half-hour before lunch and said, "Let's write a film script!' It is depressing to note that the film recently hit the $100 million mark in grosses.
In short, rather than stars, this film scores only in sucks. Five sucks from me.
