Wanted: for incoherence

There’s a hypothetical question posed monthly by Britain’s Uncut magazine to its musical interviewees: “A briefcase containing £75 million is placed on a table in a room, and you can walk away with it, under the condition that a man in Peking will fall off his bicycle and die at the same moment. Do you take the briefcase?”

A similar butterfly-effect question lurks behind Wanted, Russian director Timur Bekmambetov’s American debut, as it concerns a secret society of assassins called The Fraternity which receives its kill assignments from a bizarre source: secret binary code woven into ancient fabric.

But this all makes it sound more sensible than it really is. Wanted stars James McAvoy (Atonement) as Wesley Gibson, an office nebbish who suffers what he thinks are panic attacks, but which really mask a genetic ability to accelerate his metabolism to 400 heartbeats per minute. This is a useful skill for assassins, you see. It allows them to run really fast, grab quick-moving items, and — don’t ask how — curve the path of bullets.

The first inkling of incoherence arises with the bullet thingy. The idea is that the assassin can whip his pistol arm out, and mentally “fling” the bullet along whatever path he or she wills. But if your metabolism is that fast, why not wait in a café for your victim, run up and garrot him at blinding speed so no one can spot you, then sit back down and finish your cappuccino?

Such questions troubled me while watching Wanted, which has the gonzo spirit of last year’s over-the-top action movie, Shoot ‘Em Up, yet lacks the coolness factor of that film’s Clive Owen. Thus you’re left with McAvoy, who, though a fine actor, is a bit of a runt, and his rubbery face caught in bullet-time contortions is not exactly chick bait.

Still, there’s another thing wrong when you cast Angelina Jolie as a mentor assassin called Fox — and she’s no longer that foxy. It seems the director thought the very idea of Jolie playing yet another assassin was finger-scorchingly hot enough. But no one reckoned on Jolie’s skeletal frame, which reminds one of starving children of Darfur and lacks the appeal of her earlier Mr. And Mrs. Smith voluptuousness. Tattoos and raccoon eye makeup aside, she is cool as a no-B.S. killer who trains Gibson in the ways of The Fraternity. These episodes include hopping on elevated city trains, playing with knives, getting beaten up repeatedly and swerving bullets around hunks of pork.

But she’s also a blank cipher, aside from her exposition on why she became a killer. It seems that her family was murdered by a guy who, it turns out, was scheduled to get assassinated, but the Fraternity killer chickened out.

And here’s where the whole “£75 million in a briefcase” question plays a role. Gibson’s dad, we are led to believe, was killed by a renegade Fraternity member named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), and Gibson’s genetic skills are what’s needed to hunt him down. This seems to be the motivation driving most of the Fraternity members: revenge. They’re not in it for the money, though they have sizeable bank accounts. More puzzling, they never seem to question that their assignments are handed down by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), an avuncular older assassin who reads woven fabric the way fortunetellers read tea leaves.

You see, The Fraternity is a 1,000-year-old organization that was created to rid the world of evil men, and their front is a textile factory with old-fashioned looms manned by — you guessed it — weavers by day, killers by night.

Oh, what a tangled web this plot does weave! You just start to settle in and enjoy the hyperkinetic chase scenes and even the blood-frozen-in-bullet-time hit jobs — wherein live rounds are shown barreling through various surprised skulls in slow motion — when the scriptwriters throw in yet another angle, each one more curved than a cylinder from Gibson’s gun.

Perhaps most logic-challenged of all is a subplot involving rats made to swallow C4-laced peanut butter. The rats are then strapped with explosion-triggering wristwatches and set loose on The Fraternity’s headquarters. It’s obvious the director couldn’t resist the filmic spectacle of exploding hundreds of rats simultaneously, but since the suicide-bomb rodents do little more than create a diversion before Gibson strides in, guns a-blazing, it all just seems a bit… silly. And yes: O.T.T.

Over the top as well are the self-conscious nods to Fight Club by the Russian director (that plodding voiceover narration, the slow-mo shots of faces reduced to moosh by fists), though none of that movie’s control or wit; and the shot-by-shot recreation of the car-chasing-a-train scene from French Connection. If nothing else, Bekmambetov does enjoy delivering his action scenes and movie references.

Of course, no one’s really what they seem in Wanted, a curveball also served up in Shoot ‘Em Up, though again that movie refused to take itself too seriously, so it was easier to succumb to the dumbness; this one has pretensions of seriousness, metaphysical questions touched on but never really embraced, buried in a hale of bullets and CGI head blasts.  

It’s curious that none of these skilled assassins ever question that only certain people are allowed to “decipher” the kill assignments contained in the ancient loom cloth. But more to the point, what kind of whacked-out belief system is this? Really, now: “We take our orders from stitches in the cloth.” What if the weaver had a bad day? What if she (or he) dropped a few stitches? You could easily end up whacking the wrong dude.

But Wanted takes its convoluted assassin concept from a comic book (naturally), and it probably all seems a bit more plausible on the inked page. On film, it’s all about gawking at the slowed-down assassinations, blood explosions and iconic gun poses like a 15-year-old playing a video game.

And this, indeed, is probably Bekmambetov’s targeted audience: male teen gamers, who probably have more patience for beyond-physics camera moves and ear-crushing explosions of glass, metal and munitions than we seasoned moviegoing geezers do. In short, part of me enjoyed Wanted, but the sheer ridiculousness of the concept stopped me short of taking the full plunge. Maybe it was the part of me that expects movies to make more sense than a Looney Tunes cartoon that had a problem.