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Review #104: Wanted
Wesley Gibson is down on his luck office worker, his life stinks, his job stinks, his boss hates him and his girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend/co-worker. He suffers from panic attacks and high blood pressure too.
Suddently he's thrown into a fight for survival and a world he's unfamiliar with when a woman called Fox appears and tells him his father was a member of a Secret Society called The Fraternity, who was killed by a rogue assassin, and that he has now become the next target for the same assassin.
Cue lots of fish out of water sequences and stylish training regimes for Wesley so he can stop this assassin and gain the respect of the other members of The Fraternity.
The plot is another pretty well used one for my reviews thread but Wanted makes well with highly stylish action and violence throughout.
The overall feel of the screenplay is pretty well put together in terms of sequence, it doesn't lose the audience in what could have been a complex series of scenes.
There's plenty of humour mixed in too that keeps the audience fixed to the screen, particularly with James McAvoy's character being out of his depth.
Plus there's a little subplot involving human evolution and superhuman skills too which adds a touch of originality to the proceedings.
The action is really what the film is about.
There's lots of CGI used and use of slow motion camera tricks that bring the action almost into it's own genre, in a similar vein to Equilibrium but using slow motion in the same way as The Matrix.
It's highly stylised and very well rendered in the computer department and still manages to be really well choreographed and exciting when there's real life stuff seen on screen.
Some of the scenes involved can be a little brutal too, bordering almost on ultraviolence, but still, it's stylised to the point of not being uncomfortable.
The acting is pretty standard throughout though.
James McAvoy as the main protagonist is the best on show. He's funny, confused, naive and yet still belivable in the role of a newly trained assassin.
Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman are at their usual likable levels. Jolie in particular doing her Mrs Smith thing again.
Terrence Stamp makes a nice appearance too.
What lets the film down though, the overall feel of the film feels like a relatively fresh take on the action movie genre, but it still feels as though I've seen it all before in a host of other movies of the past decade.
Matrix, Equilibrium or even the likes of Jumper.
Basically, stylised CGI slow-mo actioners.
All in all, an enjoyable actioner that's relatively exciting and funny at the same time, but the originality it tries to revel in, just isn't that refreshing and makes the overall finish a pretty bog-standard one.
My rating 68%
Wesley Gibson is down on his luck office worker, his life stinks, his job stinks, his boss hates him and his girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend/co-worker. He suffers from panic attacks and high blood pressure too.
Suddently he's thrown into a fight for survival and a world he's unfamiliar with when a woman called Fox appears and tells him his father was a member of a Secret Society called The Fraternity, who was killed by a rogue assassin, and that he has now become the next target for the same assassin.
Cue lots of fish out of water sequences and stylish training regimes for Wesley so he can stop this assassin and gain the respect of the other members of The Fraternity.
The plot is another pretty well used one for my reviews thread but Wanted makes well with highly stylish action and violence throughout.
The overall feel of the screenplay is pretty well put together in terms of sequence, it doesn't lose the audience in what could have been a complex series of scenes.
There's plenty of humour mixed in too that keeps the audience fixed to the screen, particularly with James McAvoy's character being out of his depth.
Plus there's a little subplot involving human evolution and superhuman skills too which adds a touch of originality to the proceedings.
The action is really what the film is about.
There's lots of CGI used and use of slow motion camera tricks that bring the action almost into it's own genre, in a similar vein to Equilibrium but using slow motion in the same way as The Matrix.
It's highly stylised and very well rendered in the computer department and still manages to be really well choreographed and exciting when there's real life stuff seen on screen.
Some of the scenes involved can be a little brutal too, bordering almost on ultraviolence, but still, it's stylised to the point of not being uncomfortable.
The acting is pretty standard throughout though.
James McAvoy as the main protagonist is the best on show. He's funny, confused, naive and yet still belivable in the role of a newly trained assassin.
Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman are at their usual likable levels. Jolie in particular doing her Mrs Smith thing again.
Terrence Stamp makes a nice appearance too.
What lets the film down though, the overall feel of the film feels like a relatively fresh take on the action movie genre, but it still feels as though I've seen it all before in a host of other movies of the past decade.
Matrix, Equilibrium or even the likes of Jumper.
Basically, stylised CGI slow-mo actioners.
All in all, an enjoyable actioner that's relatively exciting and funny at the same time, but the originality it tries to revel in, just isn't that refreshing and makes the overall finish a pretty bog-standard one.
My rating 68%
