Sigh

Come on now really? Don't get me wrong, this film was very good for what it was but a lot of it served absolutely no purpose than to give the action junkie in all of us a quick thrill. Given the cast at the helm, you would be forgiven for believing that this film could be a bit more than a shallow attempt at a dramatic but action packed film. Seriously, the fact that Morgan Freeman was involved should have given this film a 5 star rating from the get-go but even he couldn't save this shallow travesty. I found myself being both annoyed and confused by this film and hopefully, I'll be able to share in my annoyance and confusion towards this film with readers of my review.

Wanted is a story about the definitive nobody named Wesley Gibson (Macavoy). His life is repetitive, tedious, monotonous and every other word in the English dictionary that describes it as a bit dull and uneventful. He works in a job he hates for a boss who's the most annoying person in the world, did I mention she's fat? Well that's apparently pretty important for this bitch of a boss stereotype. He has a girlfriend who's cheating on him with his apparent best friend (brief sex scene with this, woo hoo) and his life just seems to be going nowhere. One day while picking up his prescription of anxiety pills, Gibson is confronted by a sexy vixen (a bit too tough for my liking but there you go) we come to know as Fox (Jolie). She tells him that he's the son of one of the greatest assassins that ever lived and the man that killed him is now trying to kill Wesley. Wesley learns that his Father belonged to a fraternity of expert assassins lead by Sloan (Freeman, I know awesome right? Wrong) and it's now Wesley's fate to join and kill the man who killed his father. He is then trained by the fraternity to make him good enough to take the man down.

The whole plot in itself is generally that straight forward; it creates an excuse to have a whole lot of blood and bullets, while struggling to instil a sense of depth in our characters. It is straight forward but as is with most films these days, there has to be a "clever" twist at the end to make you think like enduring the whole painful movie was worth it. The big name actors were cool. Morgan Freeman presented his usual casual authoritative character who will take guff from nobody. Angelina Jolie, although I hate to say it as I do think she's a really good actress. Her only obvious purpose in this movie was to look a bit pretty and arouse the horny teenagers watching this. James Macavoy annoyed the hell out of me, for the first part of the film as he just came across as depressing and his annoying screaming did nothing to quash my hatred.

The only genuinely redeeming part of this film tends to be the action and the special effects which are involved in such action sequences as are featured within the film. However, even the action gets to a point at times where I just find it a bit exhausting as a lot of it doesn't make sense. A few examples of it not making sense are in the car chase scene in which a Dodge Viper is trying desperately to escape what I remember to be a Dog Food delivery truck.  Now at this point Wesley has become pretty freaked out by all the shooting so makes a run for it. Fox, all angered and sexy jumps in her equally sexy and mechanical Dodge Viper and gets Wesley in the car without stopping and travelling over more than 60 MPH without breaking his legs or some part of his spine. The other part is simply how the Dodge struggles to get away from the truck. I guess this can be explained away by just saying it's a movie, but surely the makers could have done a terminator type chase. They could have had the enemy in a big bad and destructive truck and the victims in a sexy, but not too powerful vehicle.