Wanted - A Better Script - please!!!

I've seen some tosh in my time, but this movie completely redefines the term. It's a triumph of style over quality, common sense and the laws of physics. For me, it worked a hell of a lot better than The Matrix Trilogy, which it shamelessly rips off, but it lacks any soul or charm being a typically nihilistic comic book adaptation.

It's the story of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), an accountant who abuses the term loser and should perhaps have a metal letter L rivetted to his forehead. Stuck in a dead end job, he suffers from "panic attacks" which he takes medication for. Now, these panic attacks were the first "oh come on!" moment for me. As somebody with a passing familiarity with our local and excellent Cardiac unit, my credulity was stretched that Wesley's pulse was racing at a potential or reported speed of 400 beats per minute. That's way beyond simple tachycardia and is into the realms of ventricular fibrillation, where the heart is beating so rapidly it isn't actually pumping blood around the body. Without rapid medical intervention, death is usually the outcome. I couldn't spot what Wesley's medication was, but he was popping the capsules on demand like they were tranquilisers. He should have been on beta-blockers, an anti-arrhythmic and probably have been fitted with a pacemaker.

Four hundred beats a minute. Pfft!

So we set up the dead-end nature of Wesley's "life". He goes to the drug store to pick up his pills and meets the sultry Fox (Angelina Jolie - the only good thing about the picture) who is still doing her Mrs Smith shtick from the Doug Liman movie. She has obviously divorced Brad Pitt as she is the romantic interest. She tells our hero that he is the son of the world's greatest assassin and that the man who killed his father has a bead on his back right now. All hell breaks loose and we're treated to a breathtakingly over-the-top car chase that trashes the laws of physics.

Wesley comes to in the company of The Fraternity, a secret group of assassins of whom Fox is a member and so was his late father. The group is led by the enigmatic Sloan (Morgan Freeman), who offers Wesley a position with the group and the chance to kill Cross, the man who killed his father.

Sounds all well and good so far, except for the fact that Wesley is a monumental wimp and whinger and his invitation to join the fraternity is conditional on him shooting the wings of the flies buzzing around the waste paper basket in the room and if he fails, the Gunsmith (Common) will shoot him in the back of the head.

This screwing-with-his-brain becomes par for the course in his dealings with the Fraternity when he returns to join the group having quit his lousy job and clobbered his best mate with a computer keyboard. Everybody basically beats him up - the Repairman (Marc Warren), the Butcher (Dato Bakhtadze) and Fox - while Sloane tells him that the orders for who should be killed come as a binary code in the warp and weft of a cloth being weaved on a huge loom in one of the back rooms. Fate chooses the targets.

Wesley spends the entire picture beaten and bloody - the movie is extremely violent and seldom lets up in its 104 minute running time. People are despatched left, right and centre by explosive CGI head-shots taken at ranges from point blank to superhumanly distant.

Wanted is pretty typical 2008 box-office fare - masses of CGI, lots of swearing and violence and a comic-book approach to the laws of physics. All the characters can shoot bullets round corners, and there's an unpleasant concept of making self-propelled bombs by feeding rats on peanut butter laced with a liquified plastic explosive. A macabre sense of humour - a bullet time shot of Wesley's disintegrating computer keyboard as he hits his best pal with it freezes the flying keys spelling out "F*ck You" with the second U being one of pal's flying teeth.

I think Wanted could be a guilty-pleasure movie. It's unashamedly stupid and violent but unsatisfyingly nihilistic, but I think lubricated by a few drinks and viewed in the company of a group of ones mates, this is a lads' night in movie par excellence.