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4/7/2008
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Wanted (2008)
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Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) works in a joyless office for a monstrous boss, and spends his time trying not to notice that his best buddy is screwing his girlfriend. When he’s not sleepwalking through life, he pops pills to control his anxiety attacks. Wesley Gibson is a nobody. A loser. A wimp. Then, one evening he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), a gorgeous and heavily-tattooed femme fatale, who tells him that his absent father was actually a super-assassin and that Wesley possesses the same deadly skills. She also tells him that the man who killed him is now after Wesley, and promptly destroys a supermarket in a shootout with the renegade assassin. One impressive car chase later, Wesley wakes up in a textile mill. This is the home of The Fraternity, a secret society of assassins led by Morgan Freeman’s Sloan, who carry out hits according to orders they receive from a giant loom (the less time spent thinking about the ins and outs of this particular plot device, the better).
Wesley begins to realise that the only way his life is going to move forward – hell, move anywhere – is to join The Fraternity and see whether it really is his destiny to kill bad guys. The scene where he tenders his resignation is very funny, and look out for the message that the letters of the keyboard spell out... So, Wesley joins The Fraternity and begins his long and painful training, which involves knives, guns, train-surfing and getting beaten up. A lot. Eventually, Fox decides he’s ready to begin his missions, and we see a couple of these before the main storyline of his dad’s murder and the renegade assassin who’s killing Fraternity members comes back to the fore. All this builds to an exciting and CGI-tastic sequence involving a train, a bridge and a lot of doomed extras…
The cast is very good. James McAvoy puts on a decent American accent and convinces as both the nerdy loser and lean killing machine. Angelina Jolie is effortlessly sexy and tough at the same time, while Morgan Freeman lends his usual gravitas to the proceedings. The rest of the cast have little to do in much smaller parts, but they do it well, and Chris Pratt makes the most of his sleazy best-friend role. The action sequences are exciting and inventive (one word: rats), and the way the story develops is interesting and thought-provoking. There does, however, seem to be some mixed messages in Wanted. At first, the film seems to be saying that it’s ok to go out and kill people as long as ‘fate’ tells you to, but then it changes its mind and reassures us that that sort of behaviour is not very good at all. It’s the last few minutes that make the film’s actual message hard to decipher; is Sloan right? Is Fox? What should Wesley do next? Wanted leaves you with a few things to think about as you leave the cinema, and not many action films do that.
Review by Catherine Leopold
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