Wanted
To say Wanted is over the top is to mistake the movie for something having anything to do with the top. My mother commented that the climactic chase scene in Get Smart was “over the top” which only indicated that she hasn’t been to any big-budget Hollywood action movies in the last 10 or 15 years. Wanted, on the other hand, is in the realm of cartoon-fantasy (it is based on a comic book series). It has elements of: The Matrix with superhumans shooting magical bullets wandering among the ordinary sheep (that’s you and me), every vengeful superhero movie ever made, and even a dash of style from Fight Club and adrenaline from Crank thrown in for seasoning.
James McAvoy plays the hero, Wesley Gibson, who all his life has mistaken the superhuman ability to shoot the wings off a fly and make bullets turn corners with a predilection for panic attacks. Enter Fox (Angelina Jolie) and Sloan (Morgan Freeman (my co-star if you’re playing 6 degrees of Josh Colwell)) of the ancient “Fraternity” to show him that he’s actually someone special and not an anonymous loser. The Fraternity is that one that was created 1000 years ago by weavers who have a magic loom that tells them who to assassinate. Yes, being special in this world means killing people whose names are spit out in code on a piece of cloth. Wanted has the same appeal as most movies in the genre of “guilty pleasures”: impressive action set-pieces, flying cars and flying people, and bad guys having bad things happen to them. There are some nice humorous touches at the beginning when Wesley is still entrenched in the world of sheep (the real world) and being dragged into the world of assassins. But that quickly fades into a steady action beat with the occasional admonition to the audience to seize the day.