Movie Reviews

Chuck Hodes / Universal Pictures

Review in a Hurry: Wanted may not be what it wants to be, but it's (just barely) what it needs to be: an unapologetically brutish action-thriller that moves just fast enough to outrun its gaping flaws.

The Bigger Picture: No matter how good your day was, it probably wasn't as exciting as this: Dead-end office drone Wesley (James McAvoy) discovers he's a natural-born killer and heir to a storied legacy, all of which is definitely OK by him since he has a foxy agent called Fox (Angelina Jolie) showing him the ropes.

Wesley's soon inducted into the Fraternity, an elite corps of "assassins of fate," superhuman killers who can pull off Matrix-style stunts and curve bullets—impressive tricks for a thousand-year-old cult that gets it marching orders from, of all things, a loom.

You know, for weaving. Seriously.

The loom spits out names at random, the Fraternity kills those people. It's this kind of silliness that's nearly the film's unraveling. Hey, screenwriters: pretty sure you're not supposed to try to suspend disbelief with actual thread.

This wouldn't be so galling if Wanted weren't otherwise a reasonably mature action film: visually exciting thanks to Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch), twisted in all the right ways and anchored by a star-making performance by McAvoy.

The set pieces don't hurt, either, especially not the climactic shootout, which meshes the seemingly effortless fluidity of early John Woo films with the technical virtuosity of the Wachowskis. So long as you don't particularly mind how you get there, Wanted is a hell of a ride.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Fans of the source material are in for a few disappointments. The film keeps some of the snarl of Mark Millar's outrageous comic but very little of the bite.