Wanted

[KLAXXON]

After his estranged father is murdered, the deadly sexy Fox recruits Wes into the Fraternity, a secret society that trains Wes to avenge his dads death by unlocking his dormant powers. As she teaches him how to develop lightning-quick reflexes and phenomenal agility, Wes discovers this team lives by an ancient, unbreakable code: carry out the death orders given by fate itself.

With wickedly brilliant tutors - including the Fraternitys enigmatic leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) - Wes grows to enjoy all the strength he ever wanted. But, slowly, he begins to realize there is more to his dangerous associates than meets the eye. And as he wavers between newfound heroism and vengeance, Wes will come to learn what no one could ever teach him: he alone controls his destiny.




 Take a slice of The Matrix, stir in pinches of X-Men and Da Vinci Code and garnish with a sprinkling of Hellraiser - and Wanted sounds like a re-heated Sunday roast.

Add the bloody viscera of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you'll think it's a dodgy dish ready for the wheelie bin.

Except it isn't. Russian director Timur Bekmambetov is a clever one. Despite the borrowings his movie's an original.

Based on Mark Millar's dark graphic novels, Wanted introduces us to a new kind of super-hero - a hyper-aware, amoral killer with bendy bullets.

Office drone Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) hates his life until The Fraternity recruit him to develop his "inner lion" and kill his dad's killer.

This mystical group is pledged to carry out fate's orders - as divined from micro-flaws in the weave of tapestries.

Sphinx-like Angelina Jolie - as Fox - and others batter Wes into a super-sensory killer, as ordered by guru Sloan, a granite-hewn Morgan Freeman.

In this "new" world (one resembling the Spanish Inquisition) pain is the spur and murder can be a wise precaution.

It's a world of death porn: slow-mo bullets are tracked through exploding heads, then backtracked to reveal the killer and his modus operandi.

McAvoy makes a perfect Wes, a divided man-mouse in the tradition of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker/Spider-Man or Ed Norton's Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk.

The car chases are so ingenious that you suspect director Bekmambetov is sending up an actioner staple while nonetheless delivering the thrills.

Certainly the use of exploding killer rats suggests a sardonic humour that helps to blunt the violent nastiness.

However, even a comic book movie must think through its morality. Hundreds die in a train crash as a byproduct of killing ONE of fate's victims - Fox and Wes, though to blame, are unconcerned.

Yet in other ways Fox acts in a morally coherent way - you get to understand why she kills certain individuals.

Its conscience is warped as hell, but Wanted is a highly-stylised movie with breathtaking set-pieces




With a raucous sense of style, this adventure thriller is a treat for grown-up moviegoers, stirring strong characters and intense action into a thoroughly entertaining romp.
Wesley (McAvoy) is a geeky Chicago accountant who's unhappy with his decent life. When a sudden gunfight erupts around him, he's rescued by a woman named Fox (Jolie) and he's introduced to Sloan (Freeman), head of the Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins who cleanse the world of undesirables. It turns out that Wesley's recently deceased father was a member, and that he has inherited his special skills. So after some gruelling training, his first job is to find his father's killer.

Russian filmmaker Bekmambetov's trademark style (see Night Watch) is a blast of fresh air in an American blockbuster. Sure, he overdoes everything, with whizzing camera work and editing, a crashingly dense sound mix and constant stunts and effects work. But it's done with a lightness of touch that Hollywood hacks can't dream of. And it's also made for an adult audience, never pandering to pre-teens, which allows for much more intrigue and subtext.

Not to say that the film feels even vaguely realistic. It doesn't, especially as these killers have super-human abilities to control their pulses, bend bullets and defy gravity with their cars. That said, they're also recognisable, and McAvoy's casting is a stroke of genius: he begins in the kind of role we expect, as an underachieving everyman. And he perfectly plays Wesley's transformation into a mega-assassin as much more than mere wish-fulfilment.

Meanwhile everyone around him is impossibly cool, from Jolie's omnipresent vixen to Freeman's silky-sinister boss. Stamp is terrific in a smaller role, as are Common, Warren and Bakhtadze as Wesley's three teachers. This sequence is far more than the usual training montage; not only do their personalities emerge, but we feel every brutal ordeal they submit him to.

And by grounding it in real characters, Bekmambetov frees himself to indulge in seriously gonzo car chases, hilariously convoluted mythology (the Loom of Fate!), cod philosophy ("Kill one, maybe save a thousand"), exploding rats and a spectacular train derailment. Like The Matrix, it's not nearly as complex as it pretends to be, but it's visually stunning and relentlessly entertaining from start to finish.








James McAvoy ... Wesley Gibson
Morgan Freeman ... Sloan
Angelina Jolie ... Fox
Terence Stamp ... Pekwarsky
Thomas Kretschmann ... Cross
Common ... Gunsmith
Kristen Hager ... Cathy
Marc Warren ... The Repairman
David O'Hara ... Mr. X
Konstantin Khabensky ... The Exterminator
Dato Bakhtadze ... The Butcher
Chris Pratt ... Barry
Lorna Scott ... Janice
Sophiya Haque ... Puja
Brad Calcaterra ... Assassin Max Petridge


IMDB





Download Torrent