A slick, surprising 'Wanted'

By Mina Hochberg | amNewYork movie critic

2:03 PM EDT, June 26, 2008

"Wanted" follows through on all the verbs a blockbuster ought to follow through on: It thrills, it adrenalizes, it makes you laugh. And, as an added bonus, it actually has an interesting story. It's not a prize-winning script, by any means. But it's slick, confident and innovative enough to make this shoot-and-slash 'em up film more than just a guilty pleasure.

James McAvoy ("Atonement," "The Last King of Scotland") takes on his first action role as Wesley Gibson, an office drone who despises his life and pops anti-anxiety pills like Pez until he one day he gets kidnapped by a thousand-year-old secret society of hired assassins and is told he's one of them. His father, says the head assassin, Sloan ( Morgan Freeman), was recently killed by a rogue member and it's up to him to exact revenge.

Well, not quite revenge. These assassins don't kill based on emotion. They get their targets from the "Loom of Fate," a giant, self-perpetuating loom in a Chicago textiles factory, which serves as their headquarters. The loom weaves a cloth that's embedded, via a binary-based code, with their next victims' names.

Wesley has innate assassin skills, like the ability to curve a bullet after it leaves his gun's chamber. But he still needs to undergo a torturous assassin boot camp, which makes for an immensely satisfying and entertaining series of montages.

Cursed with the whippersnapper Luke Skywalker syndrome, Wesley wants to start fighting ASAP, so his mentor, Fox ( Angelina Jolie), has to not only train him, but beat the impetuousness out of him, too. He learns how to knife-fight, train-surf, shoot impossible targets, flip cars in 360-degree twirls over obstacles. He also learns how to take punches, slashes and stabs, inflicted on him by his fellow assassins.

For every battering he takes, he recovers in a bath of fast-acting, restorative, paraffin-waxlike substance. After some weeks of training and trial assassinations, he's ready to take on the rogue assassin, Cross.

This is director Timur Bekmambetov's first foray into Hollywood, but he's no stranger to blockbusters, after breaking Russia's box-office records with his vampire film "Night Watch." That movie, the first in an ongoing trilogy, was visually inventive but flawed as a narrative, which makes "Wanted" all the more surprising for its sleek storyline. McAvoy, too, is unexpectedly suave. Thus far, his roles have been of the gentler sort, but he fills the action hero's shoes with ease.

The action is non-stop, never wallowing in sentimentality, and many of the scenes are spectacularly grandiose and over-the-top. The violence can be disturbing, especially since it's often glorified and portrayed as a sexier, preferable alternative to a boring life of subservience. But violence qualms aside, "Wanted" is a pleasant surprise after a month of disappointing blockbusters.

Wanted. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann