WANTED - a Roller Coaster Ride of Action!

You had to know with a cast like Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy that this wasn't going to be just another Action Thriller... WANTED is a comic book adaptation but unlike Iron Man, which I also loved, this film is rated Adult not PG. It was a full throttal ride and it hits every mark: Plot, Acting and Special Effects. An opening scene hasn't grabbed me like this one since the orignal Matrix!

You may remember James McAvoy, who is perfectly cast as the lead Wesley Gibson, from such British dramas as Atonement, Becoming Jane and The Last King of Scotland.

Here McAvoy plays a self deprecating, over apologetic, bullied cubicle drone prone to anxiety attacks (not unlike another one of my favourite flawed characters: The Narrator vs. Tyler Durdan played by Edward Norton in The Fight Club), who upon discovering he is the son of a notorious killer is assisted on a quest by a Fraternity of Assassins (aka Weapons of Fate), to find out who he is to ultimately take control of his life.

With a tagline like: CHOOSE Your Destiny, we know they have 99 minutes to attempt to turn Gibson from dorky to deadly. Does he do it? Well, I won't ruin it for you - because there is a great twist, but let's just say McAvoy has come a long way from playing Mr. Tumnus the Faun in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion or the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Morgan Freeman plays Sloan, an eerily calm M-Type Puppet Master who interprets a woven Binary Code that gives the Fraternity names or better - targets to assassin. Delivered in only a way that Freeman can do, Sloan explains where the targets come from to Wesley,

“They come out of a necessity Wesley. A necessity to maintain balance in the world. They are orders that must be executed. Entrusted to us so that we might forge stability out of chaos."

Angelina Jolie plays Fox and is back where we like her - cool, tough and sexy. Sure she stretched her acting muscle in A Mighty Heart but this is her bread and butter and I for one was happy to see her back driving fast cars, shooting and kicking butt!

With a theme like: Kill one, Save a Thousand, awesome Sci-Fi photography and it's 2 Fast 2 Furious car stunts (which may have something to do with the writing team of Micahel Brand & Derek Haas having written both) Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian/Kasakh film director's first American film will definitely - in my opinion, solidify him in the Hollywood community. WANTED opened in 22 markets over last weekend and collected $33 million dollars... I predict this will double once the word of mouth spreads.

Here's a line you can take with you as spoken by my new hero Wesley Gibson, "What the @#$% have YOU done lately?"

Get off the Couch People...

P.