Action movie ‘Wanted’ may lack originality but it’s made an A-list action hero out of the diminutive James McAvoy
Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov): James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp. Running time: 110 minutes.
Wanted is an action movie of supernatural bent about a cabal of assassins who keep the world peace. They can bend bullets using their minds and jump skyscrapers as if clearing a manhole. If none of that sounds strange, try this for size: the action hero is played by the compact Scottish actor James McAvoy. McAvoy? Action hero? Even Morgan Freeman cocks a quizzical brow. At one stage, McAvoy’s Wesley is brought into a room to meet Freeman’s Sloan, the boss of the shadowy assassins. “I thought he’d be....” Morgan trails off. “Taller?”. Yikes. To be fair, Wesley does enter the whole action thing with reluctance. We first meet him as a frustrated, office-cubicle accountant. He has panic attacks, his girlfriend is having sex with his best friend, and his boss, who slimes over doughnuts like a deep-sea jellyfish, bullies him over spreadsheets. All that stops in a pharmacy when a gunman makes a play for his life. To the rescue comes a vulpine beauty we later learn is called Fox but whom we can immediately ascertain is one Angelina Jolie. She whips her guns out, and proceeds to bend bullets up the aisle. “Your father was one of the greatest assassins that ever lived,” she tells him, and suddenly, the way forward is clear: Wesley has destiny to fulfil.
The director is Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, and the main thing you noticed about his Russian vampire-action films Night Watch and Day Watch was how in thrall they were to The Matrix. That influence here becomes an indulgence. When Wesley is picked up by Fox in her red sports car, in a manoeuvre that involves Wesley standing still while she does a 360-degree turn with the door open, he picks a pair of wraparound sunglasses off the dashboard. Wesley, like Neo before him, is ready to go down the rabbit hole.
He is told he is the chosen one, and must hunt down the rogue assassin who killed his father. Training involves Fight Club-like sessions where they beat him black and blue and Wesley, naturally, begins to quail. But the film is persistent, determined to make an action hero out of McAvoy now matter how long it takes. When he is kissed by Fox, his crisis of confidence seems to abate. And his height improves too: suddenly he seems taller than Jolie, who surely must be bending at the knee. When McAvoy finally bares his chest, he’s ripped and bulked for the job. Never mind a rogue assassin, this Scot could brawl an entire Glasgow chipper. He runs in slow-mo, his mouth open, cheeks wobbling from sonic speed and the transformation is complete: McAvoy surging through a building, two hands shooting, is more than credible. He is cool.
Less credible, however, are the nuts and bolts of the picture. At one point, Fox brandishes a bullet with ‘goodbye’ etched in the side, and the film too has ‘cool’ inscribed all over it. Bekmambetov, working now with a Hollywood budget, has also been watching lots of John Woo. Bullet wounds pop like mini-fountains; the camera freezes, trapping a blood globule or a tooth in mid-air; or bullets meet half-way and cancel each other in slow-motion. At one point, the camera follows a train as it plunges down a gorge, following through the smoke underneath and in through a broken window. It’s all very stylish and exuberant, with a pulsing nu-metal soundtrack, and Bekmambetov knows how to muscle a film along at good pace. But what it lacks is surprise: you feel you know the script, and you can see the twist from about 30 minutes away.
Less obvious is this whole assassination business. The group get their kill orders from a magic loom which prints binary code into the fabric. This is not what one would call reliable information. But Morgan Freeman is calling the shots and he is not to be second-guessed. Nor would you want to cross him. For all the film’s effort at hip, the coolest moment comes when Freeman barks in that lovely staccato voice of his: “shoot the mother f**ker”. Wow, you think. Morgan Freeman curses so well! It’s like hearing your father swear for the first time. Jolie, meanwhile, spends the film rolling on car bonnets wielding big weapons or smiling patronisingly, like the Queen of Sheba about to devour a man-slave. The star, though, is McAvoy, who has come from unknown zero to Hollywood hero in just a few short steps. “I’m the perfect weapon,” he says at one point, and perhaps he is. This is a star who not just can act well, but action well too. You can’t say he comes up short.
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