Film of the week: Wanted

WANTED (18)

*

DIRECTED BY: TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV
STARRING: JAMES MCAVOY, ANGELINA JOLIE, MORGAN FREEMAN

AND I thought we were done with rip-offs of The Matrix. Loosely based (very loosely based apparently) on Mark Millar's comic book series about a fraternity of super assassins, Wanted is the latest in a long line of thrill-free, CGI-heavy, emotionless action extravaganzas to recycle the Wachowski brothers' once fresh-seeming cyberpunk template.

You should know the drill by now: gun fetishisation, a slinky babe who is good in a fight, an office drone hero who discovers he's the chosen one, and reams of reality-defying action sequences that are thrown into the mix with no effort to conform to the film's own internal logic. Not that Wanted – unlike the original Matrix – really has any internal logic. It may not quite scale the heights of random gibberish that the film's Russian director Timur Bekmambetov reached with his previous film, the incomprehensible Day Watch (which featured, apropos of nothing, a sports car driving up a skyscraper), but it comes close with a couple of boring, risk-free, hyperactively-edited car chases, not to mention an elaborate train derailment down a ravine in which hundreds of people presumably plunge to their death thanks to the actions of our hero who doesn't give this a moment's thought.

That hero is Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), an account manager with abandonment issues who thinks he's the most insignificant person of the 21st century. He pretty much is, too. Plagued by apparent anxiety attacks, he's unable to stand up to his boss, his girlfriend or his best friend. The latter is actually sleeping with the former, but because Wes has yet to "grow a pair" big enough to be able to confront such things, he lets it slide, even picking up the tab for condoms that will be used in the act.

This all changes when he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), a super assassin who appears in a flash one day to save him from a would-be assassination attempt in a drug store. Why has he been targeted for termination? Turns out the father who left him when he was seven days old was actually a member of an ancient order of weavers-cum-killers (yes, you read that correctly: weavers who are also killers). Now, the man responsible has taken it upon himself to kill Wes too, in case he has inherited the same skills to do the kills.

That's the reason Fox gives him, anyway, and before long he's persuaded to leave his old, boring life behind to join the Fraternity: a secret order of killers lorded over by a profanity-spewing Morgan Freeman. As previously stated this kill squad are also weavers, so naturally, they get their targets from a special loom that delivers the names of their victims in the form of codes hidden within the pattern of the weave. It's a bit like Minority Report, if Minority Report had been set in the exciting world of textile manufacturing.

All this is explained to Wesley during his obligatory training montages, during which he discovers his anxiety attacks are really a symptom of his extraordinarily high heart rate, some-thing that gives him super-fast reaction times and, if channelled properly, will enable him to bend bullets round corners by whipping his arm a little as he pulls the trigger. He also discovers the Fraternity have special baths that enable him to cure any injuries he sustains in record time, something that seems to have been set up purely so the film could include a shot of Jolie climbing out of one of said baths dripping wet.

That this is a film designed purely for slavering fanboys to get their jollies is in little doubt; Bekmambetov refuses to use one cut when he can have 75, and the way he swings his camera around and under-lights nearly every scene is symptomatic of that specious, modern form of blockbuster movie-making designed to overload the senses without letting us get too engaged with the story in case we realise what a crock it all is.

The most depressing thing here, though, is the sight of McAvoy debasing himself in his first big Hollywood starring role. He really isn't very good and seems to have spent his prep time at the Ewan McGregor School of Bad American Accents. That's when he wasn't packed into the gym. Befitting his new action image, there's an obligatory shirtless scene in which he gets to display his newly oiled and ripped torso. It really is the weirdest sight. He's so oddly proportioned he almost looks like he's wearing one of those foam-padded Hulk costumes you get for kids. Derisory laughter was the dominant sound emanating from the girls in the row behind me at the public screening I attended.

To be fair to McAvoy, though, everybody is bad here. Jolie runs through her sexy Mr & Mrs Smith schtick using her Lara Croft accent, Freeman is just dull and Terrence Stamp, who turns up late in the day to offer some background exposition, is so doddery it's as if he has wandered in from a care home.

There's no need for blockbusters to be this bad, especially ones that are almost defiant in their rejection of the need to compromise the intensity of the action to court younger audiences as well. But, then, that's what happens when you bring in directors whose sole ambition is clearly to become the new Michael Bay.