The worst thing a movie can do is insult the intelligence of its audience. Wanted is guilty of this, and it’s tragic because the movie had so much potential to be so much more. I would describe the rough plot, but that takes about one sentence: cubicle rat finds out he is super-assassin for secret society, and his father was killed by a rogue assassin. It doesn’t get much more elaborate at any stage of the movie.

To be fair, this movie did take action shoot-em-up movies and raise the bar for the action sequences. The director watched the Matrix trilogy, and made several action scenes 10% better. He then did the same thing for Equilibrium, and then mashed in the modern teenage nihilism of Fight Club (as well as the bloody fight scenes), and ramped that up by about 10% as well. It picked some very good source material, and improved upon it.

Sadly, that’s all it did. There are a lot of very pretty scenes, ranging from a car chase between a Dodge Viper and a Purina Pet Chow truck which was the first moment in the movie that made you feel like the director honestly thought his audience were idiots, to some impressive looking gun battle sequences. The trouble with all of this is that it was familiar. Watching the movie, off the top of my head I could identify almost all of the fight sequences as being lifted from previous action movies, improved upon, and then forced into the new plot.

The other issue with all these special effects is that they felt like a cliche before the movie was even over. At least the action sequences in the Matrix trilogy felt new and impressive when you first saw them, then suffered from overexposure later. If I saw one more bullet-following camera shot in this movie by the end, I was going to wretch in disgust. Rather than use these impressive visuals in a strategic way to wow the audience at an important moment in a fight scene, they simply used it whenever possible.

Unfortunately, action sequences like those in this movie cost money, and by the time they were done budgeting for all this, they had no money left to hire an actual writer, and ended up getting the angsty teenage son of one of the crew members to write the thing up for fifty bucks and a bag of potato chips. The plot left open the possibility for some real analysis of modern issues: the nature of fate versus free will, the moral gray area in killing one person to perhaps save a thousand, the dehumanizing effect of our modern commodity-obsessed society, the extent to which might makes right. Admittedly, every one of these has been done much better in prior movies. But Wanted does not even bother discussing them.

Instead, you get a one-off answer that there is no moral gray area, and the rest gets drowned out with more hackneyed dialog and another overused bullet time action sequence, but hey this one is on a train in Moravia! The movie has the anti-establishment feeling of Fight Club without any of the actual content, or discussion of the failings of taking such a philosophy to its extreme.
At the end, Wanted is old before you even watch it, devoid of content or redeeming features. If you can catch a $5 matinee, the movie might be worth it to see some pretty, see Angelina Jolie’s very nice ass, and hear Morgan Freeman call someone a “motherfucker”, but beyond that, this movie should be purged from theaters as quickly as possible to make room for some of the more promising action movies of this summer, such as Hellboy II or The Dark Knight.