"Wanted" (2008)

An anxious and clumsy office worker named Wesley Gibson leads an excruciatingly mundane life. His boss humiliates him by shouting at him at work, while his girlfriend goes behind his back with his colleague and best friend during lunch breaks. Amidst all of this, Wesley has simply lost the will to feel passionate about anything in his life. That is to say, until he meets Fox, a trained assassin who tells him of his estranged father’s recent death and that he must now come with her to follow in his father’s footsteps as one of the greatest assassins of their time, and extract revenge by killing the man who murdered him. Wesley of course hops at the chance of escape from his numbing lifestyle and thus the film takes flight….

This movie was good. It has a brilliant cast including James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, so you know straight away it’ll be something great. I don’t think action movies are really my thing, personally. There was a big scene at the beginning amidst a car chase and it went on a bit longer than I would have liked without any explanation as to what exactly the aim of it was, which I found disorientating, but that is just me. It's still a pretty bad ass scene.

Angelina Jolie is brilliant. I haven’t seen very much of her movies, but in this she’s fantastic. Her skill is unreal, I mean she had hang out of the front window of a car while it was moving while in character. She makes it look so easy! I liked her character. There was a scene in which Wesley is first training and he’s there getting the crap beaten out of him by this other guy and she sits down at the side with a sandwich, completely composed and tranquil. I just found this amusing. In an interview James McAvoy remarked he got the shit beaten out of him by her, and he was not joking(!)

James McAvoy is fantastic. He really is brilliant at accents. I liked his character, Wesley. He was a completely different type of character to the others I’d seen him play before this, so it highlighted more how diverse an actor he actually is. Wesley worried a lot, and I worry a lot, so I was able to relate sort of, which is always nice when you sit down to a movie. The sound editing was quite clever. It took me a while to click what it was trying to achieve (i.e. his frequent panic attacks) as it would slow and muffle quite a lot in scenes and I found it so disorientating. But once I knew what was happening I thought it was very clever.  His character really does a full transformation, he’s a completely different person by the end. It was almost like a completely different movie, really!

Well…

And of course Morgan Freeman is brilliant at any role he plays too! Although, he does play a lot of the same type of roles, but how bad!

  

I was impressed with the twist in the plot. Up to that point I did feel it was a bordering a little on cliché with the whole living-up-to-his-father aspect, but I liked the twist. And I also liked how they brought it full circle round to tie in with what happened in the beginning. I love when movies do that, sort of book-ending it and it’s far more satisfying. As I say I don’t think action is altogether my genre since a lot of the movie was bang, bang, bang and blood and car chasing, which after a while I just find hard to follow what’s supposed to be the aim at the end of it. But it was tense and exciting. There were moments I had to look away. Particularly during Wesley’s training scenes. And there were several moments in which they blue up a rat. Like why? I don’t even like rats but what had the rat actually done to these people? It was this poor helpless creature. 

In any case, I would recommend this movie.

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