Wanted

Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp
Running Time: 1h 50min

Sold on the body of Jolie, and the style of The Matrix, Wanted offers little more than what you see in the overplayed trailers and TV commercials. Big on style and low on substance, this adaptation of a comic book series has a lot going for it, but fails to deliver, and is found wanting.

Snazzy special effects and hip, anti-corporate cool can only be sustained by a decent script, and are not sufficient enough on their own to make a good film. Trying too hard to be Fight Club meets The Matrix, in its use of narration and bullet time slow-mo, the movie comes off as an impostor of a good film. Wanted is the celluloid equivalent of Coke Zero. Bold, new packaging, claiming to be of equal taste, but when you get to it, it really doesn't measure up to the real thing it's claiming to be. Wanted tries so hard to craft a clever premise to go along with its dynamic special effects, however, it is too in love with itself that the story gets buried in the overuse of time altering slow motion effects.

Though Jolie and Freeman do their best to keep this thing afloat, they just can't give any dramatic power or substantial weight, when the film's lead McAvoy comes across as a little boy man who stumbled off the O.C. and into a sci-fi film. His face is one only a mother could love, and makes you wonder how it could co-exist in the same universe as Jolie's trim and sexy body, put into sexually suggestive positions straight out of a teenage boy's video game playing fantasy.

It happens all the time, but all the good bits are in the trailer. Jolie's fifteen or twenty odd screen minutes are the key to the advertising campaign, and those wicked shots are all that's worth watching in this film. Once you get the gist of the FX, they become tedious and boring, as there's nothing to back them up. The film tries so hard to be cool, so hard to be hip, that it's easy to dismiss it as anything but. Certainly, there's a lot to be interested in from this film, as there is some genuine excitement and eye candy. Perhaps a short film would have sufficed, because once it's over, it sure seems like overkill.

Grade: C+