Sweet nectar of the comic Gods, that is all I can say about this outstanding action movie.
Very loosely based on a comic series from 2004 about an average run of the mill accounting nerd that becomes a gun wielding super villain to honor his dead father’s name. Well, that was the story when Mark Millar wrote it for Top Cow a few years ago. The movie version is a lot different, and since I’d never read or even seen the comic before watching it, I was blown away.
Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) is a mousy hyper anxious account rep that discovers through a series of very cool events that he’s actually the son of a super assassin, and the heir to his criminal empire. Having spent his entire life believing his father had abandoned him a few days after birth and growing to hate him for it, he is more than a little surprised when he is caught up in the middle of gunfight in a local pharmacy between the man that killed his father, a guy known as Cross (Kretschmann) and his guardian Angel, AKA ‘Fox’. Fox (Jolie), saves Wesley from the would be future assassin’s assassin, since she herself is actually an assassin sent to kill this assassin, so Wesley can fulfill his birthright and become an assassin, so that he can eventually assassinate the assassin that assassinated his assassin father. Confused yet???
So, having narrowly escaped the cops, the pursuing assassin and the driving skills of Fox’s more than adequate long legs, Wesley’s taken to meet the current leader, and would be successor to his father’s empire, Sloan (Freeman). Sloan has provided Wesley with a very odd proposition to prove he really is the son of the notorious killer of killers; he’s asked to shoot the wings off of common house fly’s buzzing around a waste basket, or else he himself will be shot by yet another assassin named The Gunsmith, who really was Common. Bad joke but I couldn’t resist.
Remarkably , Wesley actually pulls it off and from that little exercise, he’s invited into ‘The Fraternity’. The Fraternity is a group of assassins that receiive their orders from a loom, in the form of binary characters deciphered from thread patterns. The killers do not know who or why the names they’ve been given are provided, they just know it’s fate and it’s their duty to carry out the orders, reagardless of who’s name appears in the threads. Wesley accepts the information he’s been given and agrees to take his father’s place as the leader of the Fraternity and to kill his father’s killer. Yes, I know this sounds preposterous and trust me, you need to suspend a lot of disbelief for this one, but it’s well worth it.
So far, Wanted is the coolest summer movie I’ve seen (Indy, Iron Man, Hulk) and regardless of it’s origin, it turns out to be a sweet time at the theatre… Jolie is fine as frog hair in this movie but I still feel sorry for Brad Pitt for marrying her. (WARNING!!! rant ahead) I’m sure Brad had plans to marry crazy blood oath, sex crazed nympho Angelina, and instead he winds up with Amnesty International PETA Super Mom, that adopts an excrement covered kid from every flea ridden country they visit… If you feel that guilty about being hot get a friggin puppy for the love of God! Sometimes you just have to let nature take it’s course, you can’t save em all, it’s called natural selection for a reason. (rant concluded)
Kick ass movie, go see it.
