Hunter Stephenson’s Movie Review: Wanted

The following review contains very minor spoilers.

Not unlike applying an exact birth date to new slang, it’s difficult to gauge whether director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) has invented a new language for the modern action film with Wanted. We’ve reached a point where today’s actioners are required to wear moon shoes—films like Wanted and Crank aspire to both hat-tip and one-up the Wachowski brothers’ hyperactive stylings (sans the techno white dreadlocks and Columbine coats), all the while hopping on and off the latest trends in video games, technology and comic book movies like coked-out mosquitoes.

Of course, Wanted itself is based on a comic book miniseries by Mark Millar—some fanboys would say the film merely uses the comics for TP—but the movie feels like a cultural genre gangbang where basic movie logic not only no longer applies, it’s laughed at under a calm hipster veneer for being old school.

Wanted takes the “enlightened chosen one” storyline of Unbreakable, ditches most of the ethic recoil, remolds the central hero as a sleepy, tech-literate 20something (note: resembling today’s bloggers) and posits him in a Grand Theft Auto urban fantasia with endless ammo, life, freedom and a doting, hushed Angelina Jolie at his side. Before he learns the way of the gun/Jolie, our aforementioned hero, Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy (Atonement), drifts though a cubicle-strewn life and can’t bother caring that his GF is getting dogged by his BFF on his IKEA table (shades of Fight Club) on the regular. But that’s before Gibson finds out that he can bend bullets (how trendy!); he’s also one of the world’s elite natural born killer-slash-assassins. The movie’s two lessons: 1) not trying too hard is vital to coming off cool and 2) hot doting girls are that much hotter when they rarely speak.