WANTED (2008) - ***

If you've read enough of my reviews, you should know that I'm just a sucker for action pulp. When its done just right, there is nothing more satisfying within cinema for me. Despite it's visceral barrage of visual effects and physics-shaming scenes (all made possible by a generous budget) in trying to be THE MATRIX meets FIGHT CLUB, Timur Bekmambetov's WANTED is far from meeting that biased gold standard of mine but at times it does work.

This in spite of the fact that the first act wasn't that promising. Like Doug Liman's lame JUMPER we got earlier this year, we get stuck with an emo guy (James McAvoy) who is helpless about being bossed around by his ugly obese female manager, that he is in a cuckhold relationship, and oh yeah she's screwing his supposed best friend. He nearly whined me out of giving a damn about this picture before it even began. Such nonsense is a technique of hack filmmakers to create what they mistaken as sympathetic complex emotional depth, and I just despise it.

Yeah I understand the whole point is that he's the generic corporate-cog loser like the rest of us, wanting (pun!) to be something more mighty and ultimately fulfilling that masculine destiny, a critical plot commonality of both MATRIX and FIGHT CLUB. However, remember how in FIGHT CLUB that director David Fincher never had Edward Norton be stuck with such contrived writing, and despite Norton basically being a materialistic shallow asshole, we dug him anyway? Likewise, how much time did the Wachowskis bother with Keanu Reeves to explain his predictament in the first MATRIX picture? Enough to make their damn point, and move on.

I mean, why can't we have more dickish protagonists in popcorn flicks? What is wrong with rooting for a true anti-hero that's comfortable with being a jerk? YOJIMBO and Clint Eastwood showed us this truth decades ago, and yet that wisdom keeps bobbing in and out of the Hollywood action cinema conciousness like apples. That said, I did enjoy when McAvoy finally snaps, mans up to his boss, quits his job, and beat the hell out of his backstabbing buddy with his keyboard in a shot worthy of SHOOT'EM UP.

Now despite the ratings, if you had to ask, I enjoyed TRANSPORTER 3 more than this. Sure both have completely ridiculous action sequences full of bullets, stunts, and brawling (hell, both films feature a car crashing into a commuter train), but TRANSPORTER 3 was successful pulp because it was very simple: Guy cuffed with bomb, does everything from kicking ass to being creative to save his own skin. It has limited narrative goals, but it satisfingly delivered them with blunt action cinema. With WANTED, it's style over substance whenever Bejmanbetov tries to shoot a script inbetween his eyecandy, a complaint I've heard too about his Russian vampire movies. If TRANSPORTER never had serious mental or character ambitions, WANTED does, and that shortcoming when it fails is glaring.

Certainly the elements are there to craft some truely delicious pulp. McAvoy is recruited into a thousand-year old assassin society with the mission to kill to save lives. Though tell me, considering the last century with two World Wars, several Holocausts and Al Qaeda, I think chairman Morgan Freeman shouldn't be so damn proud of his group's so-called accomplishments. There is room for improvement, you know?

Also, instead of McAvoy being trained in some exotic location, it's in the middle of Chicago. I had flashbacks to the 1980s solid B-actioneer REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS and THE DESTROYER pulp novels which REMO was based off, with top assassin Angelina Jolie having McAvoy run and duck on top of a moving subway train, or McAvoy beaten daily like cookie dough until he's as tough as wood. Now he could survive ATONEMENT.

I even liked the concept that this clique kill according to orders given by interpreting random notches they find in tapestry, which gives these murderers both divine sanction, and room for some good time ole religious manipulation. Some people have grumbled on the Internet about the point behind Jolie's last sequence, but come on folks this aint rocket science. She was the only True Believer among that brood. Then I would even add the plot twists, but they just lack punch because of how they're just tossed about without meaning. If the movie doesn't care about them, why should we?

Now there is some nice cool moments, like when McAvoy blows a hole in someone's skull, sticks his gun in there, and firing away while using that corpse as a shield. Then when someone tries to stab him, he moves his piece so that the blade is jammed into the barrell. He fires it back like a glorified harpoon gun. I also dug when Jolie abruptly kisses McAvoy in his apartment, just to humiliate his bitchy ex-girlfriend who suspiciously looks the uglified version of that Jennifer...what's her name? You know, the one that Tyler Durden (irony!) ditched in favor of Jolie?

Don't forget also the rat explosive, a slight improvement on the bunny bomb engineered by Walter Hill in his underrated EXTREME PREJUDICE.

And yet, I felt underwhelmed. Now I shouldn't complain about the lack of story, since some action pictures suffer from having too much of a bland story, but I WANTED more from WANTED. On my Top Ten list last year, I included SHOOT'EM UP, an audaciously entertaining action-fest like WANTED, but with a smaller budget and the gall to go for broke. It didn't just push the envelope, but in the tradition of THE TOXIC AVENGER, it tried to shred it. Imagine if the creativity behind that spectacle in SHOOT' EM UP where Clive Owen is shooting down thugs as he is copulating with Monica Bellucci was featured in WANTED.

Then maybe it would have become something special, worth being an asshole about in endlessly pimping it on the Internet to anyone that will listen, and more than just an decent rental which never bored me, a generous recommendation with pizza and beer on a friday night. Also, Jolie shows off her nice ass. That's a plus. Why she was willing to go topless in a piece of shit like TAKING LIVES but not this, I don't know.