WANTED

Directed By Timur Bekmambetov

Review By Jody Newman

Lights, Cameras, and Action-Packed are all words that best herald in the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF). While, at first, many people questioned Film Independent’s choice of Universal’s Big-Budgeted Summer Blockbuster-in-Waiting Wanted to usher in the festival last Thursday evening, all questions were soon put to rest within the opening minutes of this roller-coaster ride of a movie. Directed by Russian auteur Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted proves that highly stylized film-making, many brave choices, and an independent spirit of thought can work for films such as his Night Watch series, as well as Hollywood Big Explosive Popcorn Flicks.

A mesh between Fight Club and The Matrix, the ultra-violent Wanted tells the story of Wesley Gibson (a pumped-up James McAvoy), a panic-attacked office worker-bee of a man, whose life is thrown into high gear after discovering that his placement on the family tree signifies his induction into an elite group of assassins known as ‘The Fraternity’. Headed up by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), ‘The Fraternity’ isn’t all testosterone based, not with the sultry, no-nonsense Fox (Angelina Jolie, ripping the pages out of the James-Cameron- Bad-Ass-Female-Characters’ book) running the training and carrying out orders. However, not all is what it seems at ‘The Fraternity’, and soon, the newly empowered Wesley must get to the bottom of the mystery behind his father’s death, and the equally baffling truth behind the loom that decrees whom is to die next.

Based on the Mark Millar Graphic novel (with the upcoming Watchmen, and The Spirit, how much longer before this becomes an Academy Award category?) of the same name, Wanted leaves you walking out of the film with a little extra jump in your step. While the screenplay or story (not sure which one in this case) teeters ever-so-close on cliché, Universal should be proud that they had the proper frame of mind to put this project in the hands of a director that gives it the right amount of humor and action that it needs. The climactic European Train/Tunnel Action sequence is, by far, worth the price of admission alone.

So, Los Angeles Film Festival is off with a Bang. I guess I would be more accurate in saying that the film festival is off with a bang, a wham, a multitude of car crashes, several explosions, and a souped-up summer soundtrack. Yeah! That’s more like it. And with James McAvoy and Timur Bekmambetov attending the Gala party on Broxton following the feature, you couldn’t help knowing that summer is here and, in the words of LAFF, “The Audience is King”.