Movie Review: Wanted Has Too Much That Isn’t

Written by Hombre Divertido

Wanted does have Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, cool special effects, a pounding soundtrack, and at points, a frenetic pace, yet still manages to be boring and predictable.

James McAvoy plays Wesley, a cubicle-dwelling loser, who is recruited by Fox (Jolie) to join The Fraternity, a group of assassins run by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Wesley is told that his father, who abandoned him as a child, was a recently killed legendary member of the Fraternity. Wesley is to be trained to follow in his father’s footsteps and eventually enact revenge on his father’s killer. Said training takes up a ridiculous amount of the movie, as does the miraculous healing process that the injured go through by being glazed like a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

Wesley eventually gets on board in a motivation switch that is as muddled as the rest of the script. Though most of this is bad, it fails in comparison to the absurdity that is the ending to the clunker.

Why Jolie and Freeman chose this project is a huge question, but their performances are satisfactory, as is that of McAvoy. It is the script (written by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones) that is the disappointment here, as even the romance between Wesley and Fox that is alluded to in the trailers never materializes.

Director Timur Bekmambetov does his best to make this script exciting, and the special effects are some of the best of the summer thus far (except for the sequence at the end with the rats), but the audience will see every turn coming long before it approaches.

Recommendation: Skip it. It may appeal to the fans of the comic books, but unfortunately it’s far too bloody for anyone that age, and too dumb for anyone older.

Article Author: Cinema Sentries

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