WANTED

Universal Pictures/ Spyglass Entertainment
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Written By: Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, Chris Morgan, story by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas from Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’s comic strips
Cast: James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann
Screened at: AMC Lincoln Square, NYC, 6/23/08
Opens: June 27, 2008

If you’re now or ever was a card-carrying fraternity member, you’ll recall what you went through to turn from a mere pledge to a brother. If your experience was like mine, your final days as a pledge was called “hell week,” when you had to scrub the meeting-room floor with a toothbrush, rattle off the names of the fraternity founders on four hours’ sleep, and perhaps got taken with your fellow pledges to the woods, miles away, and dumped at midnight. This was all in the cause of bonding with your fellow pledges, we were later told, and likewise, in Timur Bekmambetov’s graphic action adaptation of Mark Miller and J.G. Jones’s comic strips, one young man goes through far more hell before induction into a grown-up fraternity. “Wanted,” composed of breathless action with a few pauses to explain what’s going on in a convoluted plot, is filled with car crashes, people smashing through windows, one spectacular view of a derailed train, guns that shoot bullets as though they were curve balls—in short, everything that summer actioners are and should be about. Best of all is the casting of James McAvoy, who turned in a terrific performance as Idi Amin’s naïve Doctor Nicholas Garrigan in “The Last King of Scotland,” sporting a flawless American accent: not the easiest trick to learn if you’re a Glaswegian by birth.

With McAvoy in almost every scene as Wesley Gibson, a nerdy, put-upon, pushed-around accountant, “Wanted” has the feel of a Walter Mitty fantasy helmed by Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who is responsible for two high box-office successes in Russia, “Night Watch” and “Day Watch”—the former about a group that divided into forces of darkness and light centuries ago. The story opens without the slightest background information on a Mr. X (David Patrick O’Hara), who jumps through a window onto the roof of an adjacent building only to be cut down by strange bullets that curve around corners the way that any self-respecting pro-basketball player can score a hook shot.

We’re taken into the cubicle of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), whose face turns beet-red from a dressing down from his boss, Janice (Lorna Scott). But that’s nothing compared to what follows, as Wesley, about to renew his prescription for anti- anxiety pills, winds up in the middle of a gun battle, protected by a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie), who informs him that his father had died the day before. She indicts one Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) as his father’s killer, then painstakingly inducts the young man into the Fraternity under the leadership of Sloan (Morgan Freeman), an initiation that involves getting himself beaten to a pulp to toughen him up for the job of getting revenge on Cross. He learns how to shoot bullets on a curve, how to run, jump and most important to strut his stuff as a born-again superhero.

Later, in Europe (shot by Mitchell Amundsen in Prague and in that beautiful city’s Barrandov Studios), a Fraternity leader (Terence Stamp) sets him up on a train where he can face off against Cross as though he were Marshall Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s “High Noon.” At this point, the Big Twist plays out as our superhero realizes that things are seldom what they seem.

Angelina Jolie takes a back-seat to the splendidly cast James McAvoy who, as an account manager in a cubicle has the cautious personality of the doctor in “The Last King of Scotland” but who emerges as a buttkicking dynamo under the tutelage of the Fraternity. Comic scenes center on Wesley’s relationship with his girlfriend, a woman who is regularly cheating on him with Wesley’s best friend, Barry (Chris Pratt). The pic becomes pulsating from Danny Elfman’s music, gains speed with David Bremmer’s editing, and scenic variety in Prague, Chicago and New York through Mitchell Amundsen’s lenses. Writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas’s “3:10 to Yuma” serves as background to this much faster-moving popcorn movie, but ultimately the picture’s quality depends on James McAvoy’s credible performance as the nerd that most of us are, all of us wishing for the superhero to come out.

Rated R. 109 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online