Move Review: Wanted

Brainless fun.

Emphasis on brainless.

It's not enough to suspend your disbelief as you watch this movie, you simply need to accept that the writers don't take the action scenes seriouly and neither should you. The rules of physics are not bent in consistent fashion, they are discarded whenever convenient. When a single bullet from a handgun travels through eight human skulls while continuing on a precise 360-degree path, all attempts to explain or understand are rendered futile.

Characterization is minimal, never venturing beyond well-established Hollywood boundaries of wimp-turned-badass, hot super-assassin, and mysterious-good-guy-revealed-as-bad-guy (whoops! hope I didn't ruin the "plot" for you.) The predictable result is that your emotional involvement with the characters is nil, but then again, their emotional involvement with each other is equally absent.

Morality, always a ripe subject for exploration in a movie about assassins, is given lip-service when Fox (a bony Angelina Jolie, who somehow still has a shapely ass and huge rack) utters 'kill one, save a thousand' only minutes before driving her car into a fully loaded passenger train. There's no remorse, or even an acknowledgement of responsibility, when said passenger train plunges into a canyon as a result, killing everyone aboard (except our heroes, natch.) Like the laws of physics, the morality of the characters shifts to meet any situation.

The "training" our hero undergoes is almost as ridiculous as the action scenes. Apparently, all it takes for an underfed computer geek to become a deadly unarmed fighter is to be tied to a chair and beaten unconscious daily. And you too can learn to curve bullets as long as Morgan Freeman stands behind you whispering insightful banalities like "trust your instincts."

But for all this movie's flaws, and I haven't even mentioned the peanut-butter rat bombs yet, there's still an element of fun. The scene where he smashes his best friend in the face with an ergonomic keyboard, resulting in slo-mo splatter of bloody keys and teeth, made me lol. Ditto for the scene where he flips sideways over a limousine in order to assassinate his target through the sunroof.

If all you're looking for is a trite bit of mindless escapism, and a naked-from-behind view of Angelina Jolie, you could do worse than Wanted. But if you're hoping for a good movie, this one will leave you...(sorry)...wanting.