Wanted is far too hip for its own good. The only reason the shooter gets away with material this preposterous is because it hardly puts any effort into its hipness. Shoot’em Up, the last movie that tried to make gun violence sexy and cool, put in too much effort; we rejected it because it felt forced. It was the kid who tried to please everyone and thus pleases no one.
Wanted consists of a great deal of style, but with an underlying hint of substance. This isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it invokes deeper thought in a curious final move by a character played by Angelina Jolie, but more on that later.
The film picks up with Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) as he narrates his own story from within an office cubicle at an accounting firm. “It’s my anorexic boss’ birthday,” he says in the first line of the movie. We see the boss and she’s not anorexic — she’s tipping the scales and plowing cake down her gullet. The film is filtered through Wesley’s glib attitude like muddy water through cheese cloth, his words hateful of himself and of his pathetic existence. The boss comes over and waves a stapler in the air, maniacally stapling pages to punctuate her executive threats. It sends Wesley into an anxiety attack. This is his life — wretched and meaningless.
What he needs is a revelation, a liberation. It comes at the pharmacy, where he’s marked for extermination by the world’s greatest assassin, a man named Cross. We’ve seen Cross earlier in the film as he made an impossibly accurate sniper shot that travels — over the course of about five miles — through train cars, office windows and into the back of a man’s head sending brain matter and skull into our laps. The bullet that makes this world-record trajectory is machine-cut with spirals, and breaks apart in stages like an Apollo rocket. So Cross is good at what he does, and the only reason Wesley is alive is thanks to Fox (Angelina Jolie), a competing assassin who whisks him away in a blizzard of copper-jacketed lead. 
Jolie, whose sexiness the movie feeds from, doesn’t kill many people, but I’ve always wondered how she justifies roles like this one to the United Nations, where she frequently works to promote humanitarian needs. “She’s an ethical assassin,” she might say. She’d be right: Fox does not kill indiscriminately. She’s part of a group called The Fraternity, a 1,000-year-old organization of weavers who analyze cotton fibers for ways to right the universe. This part gets a little sketchy so hold on: life requires balance and a woven piece of cloth can secretly reveal the names of bad people, those who have or will disrupt the cosmos with their actions. The Fraternity’s job is to then eliminate these irregularities from the fabric of the universe. It's like Charlie's Angels if Charlie was a pillowcase.
The fact that it does this with a certain of amount of PCP-induced zeal is one reason that Wanted works so well. It’s action on overdrive, with no regards to basic physics or Isaac Newton. Things explode recklessly, are shot randomly, and cars are required to do stunts almost too farfetched even for a movie this silly. In one scene a hitman can’t kill a man in a limo due to a layer of bullet-proof glass. The solution: flip a car over the limo so the assassin, mid-flip, can shoot the guy through the open sunroof. In another scene, Wesley is scooped up into the passenger seat of a car in just such a way that it took me four viewings to figure it out completely. 
Wanted’s big claim to fame is the way it suggests that a bullet’s trajectory can be controlled to a certain extent. “Curve the bullet,” Fox tells Wesley, who’s never even shot a straight one before. With some practice — a flick of the wrist, a spin on the gun barrel, and mostly dumb luck — he’s curving bullets around corners, hanging chunks of beef and a very brave Fox, whose hair brushes aside as the bullet cuts its curved path around her. Nevermind the fact that they can't see behind corners, but whatever. 
The bullet-curving business reminds me of what a golfer once told me: “You know what would happen if I could control my slice?” I didn’t know. “Nothing,” he joked. The golfer would be intrigued to see what curving bullets can do: eliminate bad guys hiding behind columns, shoot other bullets in mid-air and ventilate chests on curved pavilions. One scene begins with about a dozen bad guys spread out against the walls of a round room. It doesn’t require too much invention to imagine the outcome. After The Matrix, in which humans dodged bullets, Wanted is the next logical step in the bullet evolution of Hollywood. What’s next, GPS smart bullets? Bullets with MP3 players? Bullets that no longer require guns to be fired? 
Wanted is not all exhausting gunplay, but most of it is. And even though Jolie’s in it — she makes a poetic final decision that shows her extreme commitment to the Fraternity — a lot of the story falls onto McAvoy (Atonement), who must go from nerdy accountant to bullet-curving assassin in about two weeks. He must also brave various metaphysical speeches from Sloan, the wise leader of the Fraternity, a role only Morgan Freeman can give distinction. But who funds the Fraternity? Does the Universe have a checking account to pay these badasses? And if the loom goes haywire, are random people marked for death in the fabric? And who decided that binary was the loom's language? If you think about any part of Wanted for too long your brain will rattle to a stop, but it still works as a high-octane, super-stylish summer movie. When Rambo came out earlier this year, it was called gun porn. Wanted is the next best thing — bullet porn.
***This review originally ran in the July 1, 2008 issue of the West Valley View.***
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