Wanted

It's been said that part of the appeal of shows like The Tomorrow People is that it connects with its audience at a personal level. In the case of The Tomorrow People, a group of teenagers develop fantastical powers of teleportation, telepathy and mental prowess. This "break-out" was always preceded by wild mood swings, hearing voices in their heads and a certain disconnection with the rest of the world.

As their primary audience was teenagers, this connected because those kids going through puberty would be experiencing very similar conditions. It made the audience feel like part of the show.

James McAvoy attempts something similar in Wanted. He's a bored office worker, stuck in a cubicle with a boss he hates and a job that doesn't matter to him. He life is crap and he knows it. This method is used to illicit sympathy and a sense of familiarity with his situation. As a way of drawing the audience in, it works remarkably well...up to a point. And that point is when the film totally jumps the shark. While passing through a burning ring. Using the Devil's own motorbike. Backwards.

You know that part in From Dusk Till Dawn, where the film jumped genres? Well imagine that, but imagine it jumping into a genre that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Like turning into a sci-fi movie. Or a badly dubbed Japanese martial arts movie. That's pretty much how far Wanted jumps.

Look, if the fact that the guild of assassins are taking orders from fate, via the medium of binary code in the form of missed stitches from a giant weaving loom is the most sensible part of your plot, then you know you're in trouble as a scriptwriter. Unless your name is M Night. Shamalan, of course.

Strangely, if you can ignore this problem, the film is enormous fun to watch. It had the audience laughing, it's got some great, insane stunts and some good one-liners. And, as Gavin has already pointed out, it's almost worth the admission price for seeing Angelina's arse. Seriously, if Michelangelo had decided to make a Davina instead of his David, I'm pretty sure it would be something close to hers.

It was nice to see Hustle's Marc Warren in a big film. He really does well in this. But James McAvoy really has come into his own. You wouldn't think he isn't American based on this movie.

Trivia: There's a Ukrainian law that forbids cinemas to show films in Russian. As a result, many Ukrainians travelled to Russia to view the movie in Russian. During the chase sequence in which Wesley drives the Mustang and Fox drives the C4 Corvette, a camera shot briefly shows Fox's hand down shifting from above. However, it shows the shift lever from the Dodge Viper used earlier in the movie.

Score: Difficult to rate this one. It's definitely a bad film in terms of sensible plot. In fact if you actually try to think the whole thing through, you'll wind up with a headache. On the other hand it's a very good no-brainer action movie with comedy in parts.

Action: B+
Comedy: C+
Sensibility: F--

OQ: This is me taking control of my life...