Wanted

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp

McAvoy plays Wes, an ordinary, nerdy guy who has an office job that totally sucks. He's pathetic, a loser, and on medication for anxiety attacks.

But Wes's Untermensch life is turned around when Jolie pops up out of nowhere in a drugstore, saves Wes from a mysterious, spectacular attempt on his life, and shoves the gibbering soon-to-be-ex-nerd into her flashy automobile for a crash-bang chase along the city freeway, exchanging fire with the gunman. Wes is evidently hated by the forces of darkness because, quite without knowing it, he is a ninja of topping people; his own father, a master assassin whom he never knew, has just been killed by the shadowy opposition. It is his fate to be a master killer, and it is the job of Jolie - known simply as "Fox" - to force Wes to accept his destiny and enter the Fraternity, a secret society of bespoke killers dedicated to taking out important bad guys.

Wes, of course, blossoms into an alpha-male, and even gets some liplock action with Fox, which looks as if he's snogging a singed sofa.

Weirdly, though, it is Wes's pre-heroic life that is given the most passion by Bekmambetov. None of the violence and the action has a fraction of the beady-eyed intensity with which the director invests the moment where Wes quits his job and tells his boss to shove it. Because his boss is a fat, ugly woman.

I have to say I don't think I've seen a film recently that expresses hatred of women quite so openly, and fervently, as this one. This is a film where womankind is represented by irrelevant sleek babes and obese comic foils, an ugly whorehouse aesthetic that really does get across its contempt for femaleness very, very powerfully indeed.

It's sad to see Jolie, a performer with style - who did the assassin role with considerably more wit and charm in Mr & Mrs Smith - trundled out for this piffle. It's also sad to see McAvoy offer an IQ discount in a similar way. In an ideal world, the title would have the word "Not" tacked on to the front. The Guardian

(China Daily 07/01/2008 page20)