Wanted

All action movies are, on some level, wish-fullfilment for frustrated young men who really wish they could take a machine gun to work and blow away their boss or chase a bad guy down Mount Everest on rocket-propelled skis. Every man with testosterone flowing in his veins has some sort of desire to see his enemies lay prostrate before him, a busty young wench clinging to his leg...you know, caveman shit. And for the average domesticated American male, the only place to see their fantasies of violent domination come to life is the multiplex. It's usually a harmless form of catharsis, but Wanted takes the notion of action film-as-expression-of-latent-desire to ludicrious, possibly immoral extremes.

Wanted begins with bored office drone James McAvoy going through the soul-crushing routine of his life in a series of sequences that play like clips from Office Space remade by Oliver Stone. In case the viewer has missed all the sledge-hammer subtle hints that McAvoy is an ordinary, regular guy unhappy with his lack of significance, there is some helpful voice over from McAvoy TELLING the viewer how unhappy he is with his regular, ordinariness. Man, it sucks to be a 9 to 5 drone! If only a cat-eyed beauty would show up and whisk him away into a world of highly trained international assassins! Thankfully for our put-upon hero, Angelina Jolie, whose character is paper thin and seems to exist in the film soully as window dressing...grossly thin, heavily tattooed window dressing, shows up, hands him a gun, leads him through a training montage, and sets him loose to blow away the evildoers of Chicago with bending bullets. Now, McAvoy sheds the hangdog look and self-negation of his pathetic cube-dwelling existence. Shooting people from moving cars gives him a drive, purpose and joy for the first time. But there is no need to feel guilty about getting all of this satisfaction from killing: all of his victims have been chosen by the elite "fraternity" of assassins because of their threat to global order. How does the shadowy assassination team pick their targets? In what might be the single stupidest conceit in an action film since the flying bus in Swordfish, only less hilarious.

That's a running theme in Wanted: intensely stupid and ridiculous, but never quite stupid and ridiculous enough to be fun. The action sequences, helmed by Night/Daywatch director Timur Bekmambetov, are competently executed, and feature a few jaw-dropping stunts, but the heavy use of slow-motion and "bullet time" are beyond stale at this point, and the elliptical plot structure constantly blunts the film's momentum.

When the credits roll, the action scenes have failed to make an impression, leaving you only with a sour aftertaste. Not only does Wanted give the audience a delirious taste of vicarious violence, it also sells killing people with stealth and bad-assitude as a guaranteed path to personal satisfaction and validation. By the end of the film, McAvoy's increasingly smug voice-over is practically mocking the audience for not being assassins. It's enough to make you want to take a shower afterwards, and not just because you just spent money to watch a movie featuring a loom that tells the future. I'll repeat that last bit: there's a loom that tells the future in this movie.

Score: 5.6