Rating:

2.5 out of 5
Short version: Wanted tries oh so hard to be the next Matrix, but despite insane amounts of action, falls short.

Screen Rant’s Wanted review
No doubt I’ll be taking a lot of heat for this since it seems that across the board, Wanted reviews are glowing and effusive in praise. I’ve seen many comments to the effect of “it was trash, but I loved it anyway.” While I certainly wouldn’t call it trash, it also failed to win me over.
Now don’t get me wrong… Pardon the pun, but going in I really wanted to love this movie. I didn’t go in with any thoughts that it would be high art or deep drama – just a cool popcorn flick. But even in popcorn action movies I can only suspend my disbelief so much.
There are minor spoilers related to the very first scene in the film below.
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The film opens with a very cool sequence, which had me quite excited to see the rest of the film – an assassin arrives at an office about 20 or so stories high, and commences to have a gunfight with some other guys on the rooftop of a building across the street. It’s a really cool scene which demonstrates the assassin’s proficiency as he starts taking them out one by one. Suddenly they get the upper hand and he heads back down the hall and launches himself forward apparently at superhuman speed. From there we go from cool to ridiculous.
This is the scene where he breaks through a plate glass window face-first as seen in the trailer, and this is where I started scratching my head – instead of falling, he continues to fly forward, apparently on momentum. Then while still moving forward with no drop in elevation, starts shooting at his enemies. Really, I thought this was going to be some sacrificial scene as he eventually starts to drop, especially from the reverse force of firing his guns… but no. He seems to drop and them magically appears on the rooftop behind the baddies.
This left me wondering: Am I watching a superhero movie or a movie about incredibly ninja-level skilled assassins? This was a question that was never fully answered, and the fact that Wanted takes place in the real word made much of what happens in the movie hard to swallow.
From there we meet anxiety-ridden, cubicle-dwelling Wesley Gibson (played by James McAvoy). His life is in a rut – he’s in a dead end job, broke, has a foul-mouthed, overweight harpy for a boss, and his best friend is having sex with his girlfriend. How such a loser managed to score such a good looking girlfriend is beyond me. Anyway he runs into “Fox” (Angelina Jolie) at a mini-mart, where she tells him his father just died and was a master assassin, right before saving his life from another assassin who seems to be out to get Wesley.
(continued…)




65 Comments
I went to see this last night. Its pretty decent, not amazing, but worth the watch. There was some good shoot out scnenes but apart from that I got bored and predicted a large amount of the outcomes.
I knew I should have read this review before hand, but at least it stopped me from working for a good 3 hours.
Man, did the third act fall apart?!? It played more like a video game than a movie or graphic novel.
Something that doesn’t really bother me in most movies bothered me here, is the bystander body count…
***SORTOF SPOILER***
particularly the train.
and all the fate crap took things a little too far.
The movie is really a poor-man’s Matrix.
On the training of the main character, 6 weeks (or less), I can buy that it didn’t take long for him to learn to use his ‘natural abilities’, but is one of his natural abilities to not be shaken up by death? Understanding it’s your duty or fate is one things, but all-out enjoying it (when weeks before he didn’t even want to shoot at an already-dead corpse)is a little psychotic, and unsettling
Well, as someone here has already pointed out, movies are subjective. I for one liked Wanted very much, even if it seemed to be a rip-off of Matrix. It all depends on tastes in the end, just because some people liked it and some didn’t doesn’t make it a good or a bad movie.
Alexius,
Yeah, I figured this was going to be a “love it or hate it” kind of movie.
Vic
Alexius;
We can’t let you off that easy…
Are you a Jolie / McAvoy fan or a gun to-tin Texan?
We want your defense
come on, gives the details….
Comes to no surprise to me. I’m an avid shooter so it isn’t too surprising that I did not want to see this movie. I will spend 100% of the time laughing out loud at the stupid things they do with firearms in the film and the general way they handle firearms. But even given that, I tried to watch the trailers while trying to ignore the stupidness with curving bullets in flight and sniping people with a handgun, and the rest of it was still way too stupid looking.
My friend saw it, and told me how he killed the last guy (I don’t care, he knew I wasn’t going to watch it anyhow), and we laughed about it for quite sometime. Jumping cars, handgun sniping, curving bullets, Angelina Jolie, stupid gimmicky poses with firearms… yah, no way I would have enjoyed this movie.
Equilibrium is as crazy as I’m willing to go, but it’s only because that movie did it with style, and Christian Bale handled himself very well. The “style” in this movie is far too gimmicky. I’ve seen far too many movies with bullet time, shooting while flying through the air, etc. etc. And while curving bullets is definitely new, it isn’t cool like the Gun Kata is…
Guess what they are going to make a sequel! My eyes about popped out of my head reading that one..
How did Wanted do in the box office? If it did well enough you can expect a sequel.
Check my Top 10 Summer Movies post.
Vic
Took in double what it cost world wide, so I guess your right. Just hope nobody out there thinks they could do those things with real guns and bullets.
I hope nobody is dumb enough to believe that. And no you don’t need to know anything about firearms. Simple physics will tell you that is ridiculously impossible. But then again, I think he uses his mind to do those things, so it has nothing to do with physics… I think… But if that’s so, why bother swinging the arm at all? Just shoot and curve it right? Why bother shooting at all if he can control objects, he should just sling any object to kill people… I don’t know, makes no sense to me, so I’m not going to try to explain it…
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