Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Wanted

The beginning of Wanted plays out a lot like a scene from the Matrix, with a dangerous-looking man in a suit tracking down the source of a special bullet. What ensues is an over-the-top special-effects laden battle in which said man launches himself out of a skyscraper to engage snipers on an adjacent building and manages to kill them all, only to himself be taken out by a sniper's bullet in glorious and disgusting 3-D. Then we're back to a narrative by office drone Wesley Gibson's (James McAvoy), prone to panic attacks and harangued by his overweight boss. Warning: this review contains mild spoilers.

It's easy to make the parallels between The Matrix and Wanted, given the opening scene, but it's the second scene in the office that really gives the film its heart. This is Fight Club by way of Equilibrium, amping up the fisticuffs in the former with the gunplay of the latter.

Gibson suffers frequent panic attacks and medicates himself heavily in an effort to cope with the insults of everyday life: the stupid job, the unfaithful girlfriend, the backstabbing coworker. He is destined for something better, something that involves the sexiest mentor a man could ask for: a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). Jolie looks a little too gaunt here, but she hasn't lost her aura of dangerous cool and she uses it in spades to bring poor Gibson into his own as an assassin.

Gibson is, in fact, a member of a secret society known as The Fraternity, who in turn are descended from a medieval order dedicated to interpreting God's will via a loom – that's right, a loom. After translating the threads into binary coded orders, The Fraternity kills people who might alter the world's destiny for the worse.

Once Gibson transitions from office worker to gun-fu martial artist, complete with curving bullets and hyper-time senses, the movie really takes off: Gibson is out to kill Cross, the man who, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells him, killed his father.

Unlike say, The Transporter series, which started out semi-realistic and slowly devolved into action parody, Wanted grounds us in a completely altered reality from the start. It makes some of the gun-ballet and insane acrobatics performed by the characters easier to swallow, in the same way we accepted Neo's superheroic feats in the Matrix.

What's surprising is that Wanted is committed to its tale of revenge and betrayal, willing to sacrifice a potential franchise to tell a good story. It asks the question asked of all religions: how long before the speakers of God's will begin twisting it to their own ends? And what is God's will anyway? Heavy stuff, considering the premise involves shooting lots and lots of people.

Wanted is a surprisingly good action movie that transcends the bullet-time genre without seeming too derivative. Along the way, it tells a tight little story that leaves just about everyone dead. And that's not such a bad thing.

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