Wanted

Three of my top five favorite movies of all time are The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Lucky Number Slevin. Take these movies and add together their most relevant plots, effects, characters, and meanings. Then add Star Wars and Shoot Em Up. The result will be Wanted. I was so completely blown away by this movie. Perhaps there is nothing really original or ground breaking about this film, but somehow it managed to take everything I love about movies and put them together into one.

Let’s see, where to begin. Angelina Jolie has finally crawled out of her pit (Pun SO intended) and rejoined the forces of American filmmaking, and done so beautifully. Her along with what’s-his-name-I’ve-never-heard-of playing the lead guy (James McAvoy (fine I have heard of him, he is just not that noticeable to me yet (but is now))) make the movie worth seeing in itself. That’s a lie, Morgan Freeman helped, a lot. I love good acting, and damn can these people do it. The characters in this film are easy to understand in the few seconds you have to meet each of them. They make their case for who they are and what they do, and then you suddenly find your self rooting for them when you haven’t even comprehended the last guy you met.

This movie is epic. This movie stole the epic feeling that was missing from Indiana Jones 4, and added to the epic feeling from Iron Man. Explain “epic feeling” you ask? It’s the feeling that you get after seeing non stop action for two hours that makes you want to kick someone’s ass for looking at you funny and drive your car 60 MPH in the parking lot. This movie is like adrenaline that was injected during the best line up of previews I have seen in a long time and lasted until the very end. As soon as you feel like the movie is about to rest the main character gets punched in the face again. Gun fights, knife fights, car chases, train chases, cars jumping over trains, cars jumping into trains, trains falling down deep ravines… ok well, you get the point. It’s non stop, it’s epic.

But for just a little criticism, it’s constructive, I swear. If you don’t like movies that use ideas ‘borrowed’ (I use that term loosely) from other movies you will probably hate this. The plot itself was nothing I had seen before, but like I said earlier everything else seemed to have been used before in other (awesome) movies. Again, I don’t think this is bad. The main character had to go through a life transforming journey to learn how to control his “panic attacks” to become super human and bend bullets. Add a pretty sweet twist at the end, well… Well, I don’t want to dislike this movie. I feel torn. I loved it. But the entire time I just kept noticing other movies during all the action and it got a little distracting. Perhaps this is my expensive schooling finally getting to me when I watch movies, or maybe the references were supposed to be that noticeable. I am not entirely sure. I still loved.

GO SEE THIS MOVIE. But go see this movie because I told you to, not because deep down you already wanted to. (HA, more pun intended). Four and half out of five stars, nine out of ten, 3.75 out of 4, etc. I had such a good time.