Wanted?

I had certain expectations for Wanted. I expected a check-your-brain-at-the-door summer thrill ride. I love a good stupid action pic. But this wasn't just stupid. It was agressively stupid. I seriously can handle gaping holes in a plot, improbable motivations, gravity defying action sequences and eyebrows like Angelina Jolie's (Those things are unreal. How does she do that?). And this movie had all those aplenty. Fer instance, the police never question a sniper shooting from a high-powered assault rifle on top of a skyscraper. Or no news stories about a serial killer using untraceable, hand crafted and very weird looking bullets. Or that Angelina Jolie still has the hips of a 14-year old boy after having a baby. All that is highly unlikely, yet I could willingly suspend my disbelief for the magic of the movies.

But here's where things start to break down for me - a fraternity of assasins that take orders from magic fabric swatches. Assuming that it's okay to take orders from a weaving machine (even one named THE LOOM OF FATE), is just a tad psychotic. And the fact that the magic fabric swatches have been picking out assassination targets and for a thousand years, and yet they missed Vlad Tepes, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin, seems to be slight oversight. Of couse, the Fraternity's motto is "Kill one, save a thousand." Killing one to save several million must not be there department.

Also, as part of the Fraternity indoctrination process, our young hero submits himself to weeks of having the crap kicked out of him. Repeatedly. And with gusto. I see. The Fraternity recruits masochists in order to turn them into sadists. Good plan. And as a cover, these assassins who are evidenlty filthy stinking rich from the fruits of their labor, run a textile mill/slaughterhouse. Where they all happily man the looms and butcher hogs in their spare time. I guess even a trained killer needs a hobby.

But where they really, really lost my interest was early on. They kept having these giant chase sequences in which dozens of cars wouldn't just be bumped. They would be destroyed. As these high-class, super secret assasins chase their target. Not only does this seem to draw a lot of attentional that you would think super secret assasins might like to avoid. They also seem to have zero concern or remorse for the collateral damage their racking up left and right. At one point, they even derail train and send it plummeting into a mountain abyss. I lost track of how many people looked like they were either killed or seriously injured while the assasins

Okay. Why this offends me so much is that, in this situation, I would be the collateral damage. I'm not a super assasin. Can't bend bullets. Can't make my heart beat 400 times a minute. I'm just the schmendrick who gets nailed by flying debris as these whack jobs run off to kill somebody because of the magic fabric swatch. And these Frat boys don't seem to give a flying fig whether they take out 20 or 30 innocent bystanders in the process. Doesn't even come up during the beat the crap out of the newbie training sequences. "Oh, by the way, killing innocent people is frowned upon." For some reason, I take offense at being one of the eggs that an assasin needs to be crack in order for to make an omelet. Call me picky.

And because of all that, I'm going to have to rate Wanted as a movie that even a shirtless James McAvoy can't save.