Decemberr 2008 | blackfilm.com | reviews | film

Mind-Bending Splatter Flick Comes to DVD

Wesley Gibson’s (James McAvoy) life is a mess. By day, the 25 year-old slacker sits behind a desk at a tiny cubicle in a low-paying job, trying to tune out the unreasonable demands of his overbearing boss (Lorna Scott). Evenings, he retreats to the equally-unpleasant confines of the noisy dive he shares with an abusive girlfriend (Kristen Hagen) who‘s openly sleeping with his best buddy from work.

Opportunity knocks for Wesley in a drug store while waiting to refill a prescription for his anti-anxiety medication when he’s approached by Fox (Angelina Jolie), a femme fatale with a take charge attitude. The mysterious stranger calmly informs him that the father he’s never known had been a colleague of hers in a secret society of cold-blooded killers called the Fraternity. She further delivers the shocking news that his Dad was shot to death the night before by Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), a renegade assassin.

Before he even has a chance to digest this information, Cross appears in the aisle pointing a gun in their direction and a shootout erupts which spills into the street and turns into a gravity-defying, adrenaline-fueled car chase clear cross Chicago. This is the intriguing point of departure of Wanted, a graphic splatter flick based on Mark Millar‘s comic book miniseries of the same name.

The over-plotted superhero adventure might be best described as a compelling cross of The Matrix and Memento, since it shares the former’s reliance on cartoon physics elements and the latter’s love of confounding convoluted twists. Soviet director Timur Bekmambetov makes an unforgettable, if quite controversial, English-language debut with this relentlessly-amoral exercise in gratuitous violence.

A cinematic Columbine filled with wanton carnage designed to validate the bloodlust of every ostracized loser stuck in a dead-end job and daydreaming of evening the score by going postal.