So there’s this white-collar drone named Wesley (McAvoy), see? Only his dad was part of an elite assassin squad that’s been around for, like, a thousand years. Suddenly, Wesley is recruited to join his late pop’s secret society, as he’s the only one who can kill the… Sorry, why are we talking about the plot? What you want to know about is the curvy-bullet trick, in which someone mimes a screwball pitch with a pistol so they can fire around corners. Neat! Or how shells burst through brains, only to slo-mo rewind back into the gun barrels that fired them. Cool! Or when Angelina Jolie—playing McAvoy’s badass mentor—steps out of a holistic-healing hot tub in all her leonine stick-figure glory. Sexy?…Then there’s this car chase where they flip… Hold on, I’m hyperventilating…let me breathe into this bag for a second.

Though this all-killer-all-filler action flick from Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Day Watch) is based on a comic book and replicates the next-level momentum of a video game, it’s more like the cinematic equivalent of an energy drink. The film keeps artificially pumping your adrenal glands with mindless, malnutritional sensations, only to leave you crampy and cranky minutes later. Having pummelled us, Passion of the Christ–style, for an excruciatingly long haul, this exercise in ultra violence then insults us by having a beaten, bloodied McAvoy inform viewers that he used to be a loser “just like all of you.” Hey, Wanted, what did we ever do to deserve such punishment, except give you RM12 and almost two hours of our wasted time?

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Time Out rating: 2/6

Source: Time Out New York Issue 665: June 26 -July 2, 2008