All throughout Wanted’s 110-minute running time, I had the strange feeling that I had seen this movie somewhere before. A loser/nobody in a dead-end job is recruited by a sexy woman and a powerful man into a world where the rules of reality cease to exist… and he becomes capable of performing unbelievable feats—most of them involving a gun. Sound familiar to anyone else? If you need a hint, try inserting Keanu Reeves as the nobody, Carrie-Anne Moss as the woman, and Lawrence Fishburne as the big man. Got it now? Good.

In Wanted, the nobody is Wesley Gibson, who works as an account manager verbally abused by his annoying boss every morning—while his best friend is back at his apartment getting it on with his girlfriend. Wesley grew up never knowing his father (who left when he was just a baby) and has no idea that, while he is crunching the numbers this morning, his assassin father is meeting his demise on a nearby rooftop.

He has no idea, that is, until the stunning Angelina Jolie shows up as a character appropriately named Fox and informs Wesley that his father was a special kind of assassin whose ability also flows through his own veins. Turns out those panic attacks Wesley is prone to have are actually the moments when his inbred abilities are trying to take over. There’s no time to explain, though, because the assassin that killed his father is pointing a gun at the back of Wesley’s head.

After escaping via an adrenaline filled, CGI-laced car chase, Wesley is taken to a textile plant where Fox and the other deadly assassins of “The Fraternity” operate under the direction of a man named Sloane (this would be Morgan Freeman, subbing for Fishburne).

It turns out that Wesley is the only one capable of getting close enough to his father’s killer, the rogue assassin Cross, to do him in so The Fraternity can return to killing as usual.

The plot from that point is pretty easy to predict. Wesley first rejects the mission, changes his mind, then learns all about being an assassin in a three-minute montage before taking his first assignment leading him toward Cross.

How predictable is this movie? Well, anyone who has spent any part of their lives in a darkened theater knows that when a mentor advises the hero that he shouldn’t trust anybody, the mentor will certainly be revealed as the one he couldn’t trust. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught me that.

It’s pretty obvious that director Timur Bekmambetov and his screenwriters used The Matrix as a model for their film, but—crazy as it sounds—Wanted lacks the believability of its sci-fi predecessor. Whereas The Matrix created and explained this alternate computer-generated reality that allows its characters to perform superhuman stunts, Wanted takes place in the “real world,” writing off these powers as something that some people were just inherently born with. The film starts to explain the talents being related to the increased heart rate that Wesley believed to be panic attacks, but ends up avoiding the topic in favor of the montage concluding with James McAvoy’s Wesley finally being able to bend the bullet (akin to Neo being able to leap to the next rooftop in The Matrix).

Despite their lack of believability, the action scenes in this film are impressive, particularly a spectacular train crash that comes at the film’s apex. It’s hard, though, for me to get excited about stunts that are so obviously computer-generated, and sometimes the pacing seems so slow I want to accuse it of lollygagging; but I give the filmmakers credit for creativity, and the action sequences might be even more enjoyable for audiences who haven’t happened to see about 85% of them in the film’s trailers.

Those willing to completely suspend disbelief (and requirement of a plot) in favor of a few exciting, unique, and creative action scenes would probably do okay to see this movie in theaters. If you prefer a greater number of exciting and unique scenes with a creative plot, however, you may want to look elsewhere.

Wanted is rated R for “strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexuality.” There are probably more bullets blasting out of the back of people’s heads in this movie more than any other since The Departed, and this time it’s in slow-motion. This movie is not for those opposed to bloody violence and language.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Wanted.