Wanted by Paul Bullock

“What the fuck have you done today,” asks an annoyingly smug James McAvoy at the end of Wanted. Well young man, I woke up, had a shower, enjoyed a hearty breakfast, went to work and then lamentably came to see this film. You? Say again. You did what? Spent the day crashing fancy sports cars into jam-packed buses, blowing up industrial estates with combustible rats (don’t ask) and killing people in ever more elaborate and increasingly absurd ways? And…you’re, erm, PROUD about that? And you’re saying I’M the one that needs to go home and re-evaluate my puny little existence? Clearly there’s some kind of mistake here…

Apparently not though. That, believe it or not, is what the makers of Wanted want you to think. Directed by Night Watch helmer Timur Bekmambetov, and based on the graphic novel by Mark Millar and JG Jones, Wanted tells the story of Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), a humble office worker with a dictatorial boss and cheating girlfriend. He mopes about all day doing little to try to turn his life around, but finds salvation in the shapely form of super-assassin Angelina Jolie, who after saving him from an enemy killer, introduces Wesley to an underground team of colleagues (including Marc Warren, rapper Common and leader Morgan Freeman) and tells him he has a destiny far beyond Microsoft Excel and accountancy reports.

What follows is a haze of headache inducing fight scenes and acrobatic gun-slinging sequences, as Jolie shows our hero how to fight, shoot and kill people IN THE COOLEST POSSIBLE WAY. But there is a point here beyond mere AWESOME SHIT. Fancying itself a bit of a twenty-first century Fight Club, Wanted depicts a character who is on a voyage of self-discovery, re-asserting his flailing masculinity (his boss, notably, is a woman. And a fat one at that) and re-connecting with his lost father through ultra-violence. However, unlike its idol film, Wanted actually believes the macho bluster. While Ed Norton’s character in David Fincher’s 1999 classic asserted control over his life by killing Tyler Durden, and not crucially by creating him, Wesley never sheds his Neanderthal ways and succeeds by killing, killing and then killing some more.

This dubious moral isn’t made any more palatable by Bekmambetov’s direction. Shot like a music video helmed by an ADD-suffering fifteen-year-old version of Michael Bay, Wanted makes last year’s equally rambunctious Shoot ‘Em Up look like The Seventh Seal, but adds 300-style levels of violence appreciation into the mix just for good measure. Kicks fly in super slow motion, bullets glide through the air with all the pace of an ailing snail and punches connect with the force of an atomic bomb. In one scene, we’re even given the opportunity to see this twice, as a man is shot in the head from behind, and the bullet slowly bulges from his forehead, before going back into the brain and out the other side as the film ‘rewinds’ to show us where the shot originated from. Ultra-violence doesn’t even begin to describe it.

At the centre of all this chaos, McAvoy turns in a decent enough performance (and solid American accent) as the ordinary man thrust into an extra-ordinary situation, while Jolie is suitably sultry as female assassin Fox and Morgan Freeman does what he’s sadly doing more and more of these days: phoning in a lazy performance for a film way below his talents. Of course, some will find Wanted a stupid, harmless special effects bonanza - after all, no film which features a mystical loom (again, don’t ask) can possibly be taken seriously, right? But most films as dunderheaded as this don’t lecture the audience with a moral so backwards even a child would dismiss it, and certainly don’t try to imitate one of the most significant films of the last decade while doing so.

What the fuck have I done today, James? Had a grown-up life. You?