Wanted

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is an accountant, a beaten-down drudge who works in a cubicle and whose girlfriend is having an affair with his best friend. He’s given up on life. And then one day while he’s at the drugstore, a mysterious, beautiful woman called Fox (Angelina Jolie) comes up to him, tells him that his father is dead, and then grabs him and throws him out of the way of a bullet from a gunman who evidently wants to kill Wesley, too. Just like that, he finds himself in the middle of a war between a centuries-old secret society of assassins and one of their members who has gone rogue. It seems that Wesley’s long-missing father was a member of the society, and Wesley has inherited his enhanced abilities. The assassins want to train him to fully utilize those abilities, because for some mysterious reason, they believe he’s the only one who can take down the rogue.

Naturally, things get a lot more complicated before everything is said and done. WANTED, based on a comic book series, is almost as bloody, goofy, and over-the-top as SHOOT ‘EM UP. Not quite, mind you – there are no carrots involved in this one – but almost. Probably needless to say, I loved it. As for the reason . . . well, at one point while we were watching it, my daughter looked over, saw me grinning at some ludicrous action scene, and said, “You are such a boy.”

Guilty as charged.