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Wesley (James MacAvoy) is a loser in life. His girlfriend is cheating on him, he has a dead end job and every time he thinks about standing up for himself he gets panic attacks. Only they're not panic attacks, because Wesley is one of a very small group of people who can control their body's adrenaline, making them capable of carrying out acts of superhuman ability such as leaping from building to building and curving bullets in flight. He is inducted into a fraternity of assassins who guide humanity's development by killing people. One of their number has gone rogue, however, and has Wesley in his sights. He is going to have to learn to be a killing machine in double quick time if he is to survive.

Wanted would desperately like to be considered as the new Matrix. Every scene screams out to be compared to the adventures of Neo and his pals against the machines, but it lacks one vital ingredient that the Matrix possessed - being the first. Everything that Wanted wants to do has been done before.

Which is not to say that it's not fun because it is. It is unlikely that any film directed by the, quite frankly, bonkers russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch and Daywatch) could ever be anything other than entertaining. The action sequences are ridiculously over the top and CGI'd to within an inch of their lives, but that's all part of the fun. Gone are the days when simply shooting someone was enough, now you have to shoot them by curving a bullet around two other people whilst standing on a train hurtling through the night. Can't get the mark through his bulletproof windows? Then flip the car and shoot him through the sunroof. It's all ludicrous, but moves with such incredible pace that it doesn't matter.

James MacAvoy does a sterling job of anchoring all this nonsense and loopy plot (the targets of the fraternity come from a code in a magic loom apparently) by making his evolution from downtrodden loser to superhuman assassin both painful and real. He is ably supported by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman who could both sleepwalk through their roles as Wesley's mentors and still look impossibly cool. They prove it by sleepwalking through their roles as Wesley's mentors and still looking impossibly cool.

But the real star of all this is the director. Knitting together the breathless action and silly plot with an energy and brio that the action genre would do well to follow, he manages to come up with an utterly unbelievable, but utterly entertaining popcorn movie.

Learn more about this author, Darren Humphries.
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