"Wanted": Cubicle drone pledges a frat ... of assassins

Next to "The Hottie and the Nottie" -- and for entirely different reasons -- no movie this year will make you want to shoot someone in the head more than "Wanted."

The hyperviolent action-fantasy from the director of Russia's megahit "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" flicks is filled with stylized, slow-motion, bullet-through-the-noggin porn shots that would make for a great double-bill with last year's "Shooter." In fact, everything about the movie stops just short of being laughably ridiculous. Just short, though: It's a kick, in a "Matrix"-ey, brutal way.

Transitioning from romance hero to geek role model, James McAvoy ("Atonement") plays Wesley, a harassed, anxiety-ridden, cuckolded cubicle drone who's such a nobody that Googling himself yields zero results.

Before you can say "Neo," a hot and quasi-superhuman shooter named Fox (Angelina Jolie) yanks Wesley out of his drab existence and into a realm he never knew existed -- by way of a spectacular shootout and a preposterously spectacular car chase. Turns out the dad Wesley never knew was part of her ancient group of super-assassins called the Fraternity, whose heightened abilities include the power to curve bullets around obstacles to make impossible shots. The Warren Commission would have loved this movie.

Frat head Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells Wesley that old pops was assassinated by a rogue named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), and it's time for the boy's initiation. It's nearly as bad as any college frat's, and includes getting the living daylights beaten out of him while tied to a chair, lots of time in super-healing wax baths, and practicing assassination-as-extreme-sport with his new partner, Fox.

Back to the ridiculous: As Wesley butches up, he's told his anxiety -- really the source of his heightened senses -- is from 400 heartbeats a minute. Boy, HMOs are even more slipshod than we thought. And Sloan gets his assignments for the Fraternity's assassins from binary code embedded in fabric from a "loom of fate" that determines who must die -- no questions asked. That's right: They're working from Swatches of Doom! Keep moving, right past the exploding mice, too. But would you trust an outfit that gets targets on white fabric after Labor Day?

The impressive action includes a whopper of a set-piece involving a train, a car-as-projectile and a huge chasm. Director Timur Bekmambetov's gimmicks and the A-list cast sell the nonsense -- avuncular Freeman as the heavy, tattooed Jolie surprisingly enthralling as a sadist, and McAvoy slipping expertly between palpably impotent frustration and full-on badness.

Only the basic concept survives from the source comic book written by Mark Millar and illustrated by J.G. Jones, which was a bit more psychotic, populated with costumed supervillains and featured a Wesley modeled on Eminem, as well as a bad guy made of feces. Same message, too: Have you taken control of your life by shooting someone in the head today?

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259

or mrahner@seattletimes.com