You wouldn't know it from looking at the trailers, but the film “Wanted” is actually based on a comic book about a loser who joins a group of supervillains who, years earlier, secretly got rid of all the superheroes and took over the world. A definite far cry from the film version, where the supervillains are replaced by assassins, but the story otherwise remaining the same, with a number of other changes so that it all flows better. And if you ask me, that actually seems to work in the movie's favor.
“Wanted” is the story of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a nobody whose life is going nowhere. His dad walked out on him when he was only a week old. He's stuck in a dead-end office job where he's constantly abused by his boss. His girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend, at the same time constantly ripping on him about everything. His life sucks, he knows it, yet he does nothing about it but constantly apologize and take medication for what he thinks are anxiety attacks.
All that changes when he meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), who by chance rescues him from a mysterious man who tries to gun him down. She then brings him to Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the leader of the Fraternity, a clandestine group of assassins whose mission it is to carry out select killings, determined by fate via a mysterious fabric loom, in order to maintain balance in the world. Wesley's absent father, who he learns had recently been killed, had been a member of this group, and Wesley himself has inherited the lightning-quick reflexes and skills with weapons that his father and the rest of the group possesses. Taking a chance at a new, more exciting life, Wesley undergoes the brutal training to become a Fraternity assassin so he go after Cross, the renegade who betrayed the group and killed his father. But the deeper Wesley gets and closer he gets to Cross, he begins to learn that things are, of course, not as what they appear to be.
“Wanted” is truly a guy's movie, full of intense action, insane violence with lots of gunplay, and a fountain of foul language. There's lots of CGI-enhanced action sequences, with the characters pulling off all sorts of stunts with cars and doing things with guns, like making a bullet actually curve around an obstacle to hit a target simply by the way the gun is whipped while firing, that are of course impossible to do in real life. At least “The Matrix” had the excuse of being set in a computer-generated virtual reality where such action made sense, as opposed to the “real world” of “Wanted”. Yes, it's completely and totally unrealistic as an action movie goes, but that's what makes it a completely enjoyable movie to watch and thus escape reality. Plus it's funny as hell to see Wesley smash someone in the face with a computer keyboard and see the keys flying out spell “Fuck You”.
What probably makes this movie enjoyable for a lot of folks is the character of Wesley, particularly at the beginning of the film before he's recruited into the Fraternity. We've seen this type of character before, in films like “Fight Club” (probably the best comparison) and in a lot of comic books like “Spider-Man”, who start out as losers and then evolve into stronger characters through chance. Countless anime have used this type of character as the main protagonist, the most notable being Shinji from “Evangelion”. Wesley is even a lot like Shinji at first, with his constantly saying “sorry” and letting folks walk all over him before his life change. What makes this kind of character so enjoyable, no matter how annoying he seems at first? Because of a lot of us can relate to this character and wish we could go through the transformation Wesley does from meaningless office drone to super-assassin. After all, who doesn't want to be a bad-ass?
Probably the best part of the film is watching Wesley's training to becoming a Fraternity assassin. It is rather brutal and intense to watch, as he's constantly getting beat up with actual fists while tied to a chair to become desensitized to pain or cut up with knives during close combat training, only to be healed in the group's special nutrient bath and go through it all over again. We've seen countless martial arts films like this where the main character goes through intense training to take on opponents better than he is, and just like those films, Wesley's has a point, as the Fraternity is trying to make him realize who he really is and stop being such a wuss. It truly takes the idea of “hard love” to a new point.
