Wanted "goes postal" with wireless speed.
It's a tall tale of skyscraper proportions: the gory story of a put-upon accountant who discovers that he's the son of a top assassin in a secret world of super-assassins. The film pulls you by the scruff of the neck and makes you thankful for it. It releases every ounce of pent-up frustration and rage in your body.
The Russian director, Timur Bekmambetov, gives the action scenes full-frontal bravura. He roots the antihero's adventures in scabrous reality and then bends it as if with his arms, neck and teeth. He mixes real stunts and computer-generated imagery so vividly that even the CGI seems to have fingerprints, creases and bite marks.
In scene after scene, hit men and hit women use their supercharged adrenaline to fuel amazing leaps across the canyons between skyscrapers, atop city traffic or above an elevated train bridge. They wind their bullets' trajectory around any person or thing that stands between them and their targets.
As he did when he rose to international fame with the splashy vampire horror/sci-fi of Night Watch and Day Watch, Bekmambetov creates a convincing, scuzzy-colorful alternate world. The superpowers of these super-antiheroes click because they're also building blocks of the plot. These assassins calculate each other's freaky, exciting abilities with the exactness of baseball statisticians, then they use these calculations to erect tense and thrilling traps.
What's bleakly hilarious about the whole movie is that Bekmambetov directs the nonaction scenes just as hyperbolically. When young, slight Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) confronts the in-his-face officiousness of his boss or the barely contained smugness of his best friend (who is bedding Gibson's girlfriend), you feel a weird visceral malaise.
You want to shake Gibson by the shoulders, slap him on both sides of his head, flush the pills he's taking for panic attacks (the medication actually makes him numb) and tell him to be a man. Luckily, it doesn't take long for Angelina Jolie's svelte assassin, Fox, to do something even better.
She snatches Gibson from obscurity and brings him into the Fraternity, an artisan's guild of weavers - and hit men. For a millennium or so, it has been guarding the "Loom of Fate," which weaves the names of evildoers targeted for death into a binary code contained in flaws within the fabric. Gibson soon learns that his panic attacks are spikes of adrenaline that make his heart pump at 400 beats a minute and empower him to run like the Flash, leap like the Thing, shoot like Annie Oakley and drive like a NASCAR champ - with seemingly telekinetic powers over cars and ammo.
