Timur Bekmambetov
Wanted

Misled by the trailer, I set out to watch the DVD featuring Angelina Pitt Jolie. Mistake! The protagonist is James McAvoy. Ok, let's start over. I'm about to watch a film with James McAvoy, where he's super cool and kicks the bad guys' butts. Mistake! That's two. He's a loser with panic attacks who does an anonymous job with an anonymous face. Ok, let's start over. Let's watch an action movie full of boom crash bang... hoping I haven't messed up again... Finally!!! 90 minutes of surreal shootouts, bullet time as if it's raining, and plenty of imagination.

The film is a story at the edge of science fiction (not exactly a literal adaptation of a comic with the same name), where a brotherhood, actually the "Fraternity", is a league of assassins existing for 1000 years, who receive orders from a textile loom, the Fate, which with binary code hidden in the fabric, lets them know who their target is. Everything runs smoothly until a loose cannon decides to destroy the Fraternity from within. Selected as the cure for the disease afflicting the Fraternity is an unremarkable employee with panic attacks. The employee, from complete anonymity, will become a formidable killing machine, ready to defeat evil with a cold-bloodedness previously unknown to him.

Everything is seasoned with super sporty cars, Viper, Mustang, and Corvette, as well as fight scenes more akin to Kung fu than firearms use. From this perspective, it seems that the director wanted to reference the less fortunate "Equilibrium" with its Kata Guns, perfectly calculated moves, almost like choreographies that leave no room for mistakes.

As mentioned earlier, the cast includes McAvoy, Jolie, and a serene Freeman. Surely, the film won't make history for character introspection but at most for having entertained for 90 minutes with lots of noise and action. We are still far from specialists like Michael Bay and John Woo, or the more daring Wachowski Bros, but fortunately, the film has no dead moments and the story is a succession of actions and explosions and at most some erotic moments (the unexpected kiss with Jolie disturbed my sleep).

If you have some time to lose or need to fill an afternoon, it’s definitely a movie to watch with lightness and without any pretense. Noteworthy is the scene where the protagonist takes charge of his destiny and, in a single scene, tells off the fat boss and smashes his best friend's face with an ergonomic keyboard. Hilarious!

Cheers!