WANTED

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Adrenaline Rush
Kazakh Director Timur Bekmambetov Storms Hollywood
By Cole Smithey

James McAvoy is a better actor than Angelina Jolie is. He’s more skilled at creating a character than Morgan Freeman.

So it is that the Scottish actor, most famous for his role in "The Last King of Scotland," commands Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov’s eye-popping action picture with a gravitas and sinewy instinct that brings the audience inside its visually pleasing set-pieces as a welcome partner in crime.

Based on a comic strip by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, "Wanted" is about Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), a nerdy low-level office clerk with an inbred gift for assassination that he only discovers under the cruel tutelage of a similarly gifted group of killers led by Morgan Freeman’s detached character Sloan. Bekmambetov earned a loyal following with his groundbreaking films "Night Watch" and "Day Watch," and more than pays off on his promise as the most graphic-minded director in the industry with a startling Hollywood debut that will be studied for years by the next generation of action film directors.

From start to finish, "Wanted" is a virtuoso piece of high-tech action cinema. Its opening assassination sequence plays out amid a high-rise Chicago skyscape where the human target is every bit as efficient and nasty as the group of men curving specialized bullets at him.

Our sitting duck runs down a long corridor away from the giant plate-glass windows that explode inward with gut-wrenching velocity. He waits for an elevator that we presume will enable his escape. Yet when it arrives, he steps inside to dig his heel into the lift’s steel back wall for the additional amount of trajectory he needs to eject himself to the skyscraper across the street where his attackers work their high-powered rifles. We breathe in the time-bending adrenaline rush before being sucker-punched with an almost jokey plot twist that will eventually bookend the story.

Where the visual dynamics of the Wachowski Brothers’ "Matrix" movies used a palate of starkness, Bekmambetov’s cinema is filled with balanced micro and macro visual cues and details that get sandwiched neatly between character motivation and reaction.

Wesley’s transformation from browbeaten office wonk to confident man-of-the-world comes via Sloane’s 1000-year-old "Fraternity" of killers, who inform the newbie executioner that he is being trained to avenge his father’s death by killing an assassin named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). The indoctrination process for Wesley’s hard-earned bullet-curving skills make up the film’s most significant sub-plot, and allow the camera to paint Angelina Jolie’s tattooed body with plenty of fleshy attention.

"Wanted" marks a transition into a new brand of spectacle cinema rooted in character study, and with an impermeable veneer of anti-authoritarian satire. It’s a movie that’s as closely related to "Fight Club" as it is any John Woo film.

It also galvanizes James McAvoy as an actor capable of delivering humor, emotion and empathy with a transparent performance that everything else gravitates around. He’s a better actor than Russell Crowe because everything he does is unfettered and effortless. You’ll come for the action; you’ll enjoy it more because of James McAvoy.

Rated R. 110 mins.