dailynewsnblog
The summer after my freshman year of college, I returned home to partake in a favorite pastime among my group of friends: staying up far too late and seeing stupid movies at our local theater. That summer, we also founded a highly competitive Wiffle ball league, complete with drafted teams and a custom-built backstop with its own strike zone.
After seeing one particular movie and laughing endlessly at a ridiculous line from it, I developed my signature pitch: I would scream “Curve the bullet!” and hurl a long, looping curveball from second base. Pretty much everyone refused to swing, assuming there was no chance I could hit the strike zone. Yet I did.Curve the bullet!
That movie was Wanted, director Timur Bekmambetov’s 2008 adaptation of the comic by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones. 18 years later, it remains perhaps the single most bonkers action movie of the century. Now that it’s free to watch on YouTube, a new generation can experience the peculiar joy of watching James McAvoy curve a bullet around Angelina Jolie’s head.
McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, an anxious office worker whose life has become a never-ending barrage of tiny humiliations. His overbearing boss berates him in front of the entire office. His girlfriend cheats on him with Barry (his supposed best friend, played by a pre-Parks and Recreation Chris Pratt). Then a sexy assassin named Fox (Jolie) informs Wesley that the panic attacks he experiences on a near-constant basis are actually bursts of adrenaline that give him superhuman reflexes and strength. His recently murdered father belonged to an ancient fraternity of assassins, she explains, and Wesley has inherited his genetic gifts.
While the initial setup feels very Office Space, the satisfying pivot isn’t to financial crime but rather to an R-rated superhero origin story. Wesley quits his job by smashing Barry in the face with a keyboard and joins the Fraternity, an organization that operates out of a textile mill (which seems silly at first until we learn about the infamous “Loom of Fate”) and is led by a wise man named Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Wesley undergoes some brutal training until he can harness his abilities, curve the bullet, and even shoot the wings off flies. It’s all presented with absolute conviction and ultimately comes across as a more outrageous kind of John Wick.
Curving bullets requires total commitment
That conviction is essential. Wanted is not a parody of action movies. Bekmambetov commits to every ridiculous flourish with deadly seriousness. This is a movie in which an ancient loom (the Loom of Fate!) produces binary code with its fabric, revealing the names of people who must be killed to preserve world order. Freeman explains this silly idea with the same gravitas he used to provide the voiceover in Shawshank Redemption.
Bekmambetov had already developed his taste for grimy urban fantasy and otherworldly physics in the Russian blockbusters Night Watch and Day Watch. In Wanted, he applies that visual language to Hollywood spectacle. The camera follows various bullets as they crash through glass and curve around cars. Time accelerates and slows with Wesley’s pulse — which places Wanted squarely in the long line of post-The Matrix action movies obsessed with slow-motion action. The over-the-top nature of it here feels like a mid-point between classic, colorful Zack Snyder and live-action Looney Tunes, but it moves too quickly and hits too hard for all that absurdity to mar the excitement.
Assassins duel atop moving trains. There are rats filled with tiny bombs. One sniper bullet travels miles across the city, plunging through various buildings, an energy drink, car windows, and even a single donut hole before hitting its target. At one point, somebody even curves a bullet in a full circle within a single room.
McAvoy gives all this nonsense a lot more credibility than it deserves. In 2008, he was best known in the United States for dramas like The Last King of Scotland and Atonement. He seemed like a Very Serious Actor in many ways, yet here he’s positioned as the ridiculous, unlikely action hero. That makes him unusually convincing as Wesley. He looks genuinely trapped behind his desk, and his nervous energy makes the character feel relatable. The fantasy works because Wesley is just some guy who hates his job and can’t muster up the courage to stand up to his boss. We sympathize and relate to him. Then his journey becomes one of wish fulfillment for the audience. How can we not want our anxiety to become a superpower and to get friendly with a beautiful assassin?
Jolie is the opposite extreme. Fox doesn’t even really feel like a fully developed person. She’s an impossibly cool action icon, and Jolie plays her with an appropriate level of wooden detachment — but that’s sort of the point. The camera shamelessly treats her as a sex symbol, particularly for a generation of boys who had already watched Jolie as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movies. Fox is aloof because she’s just that cool, and only someone like Jolie can sell that well enough to make it believable.
Hollywood stopped making action movies this gloriously stupid
Wanted also arrived at a real turning point for Hollywood action. It opened in June 2008, the same summer Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe and The Dark Knight demonstrated how serious, prestigious, and enormously profitable a comic-book movie could be. In the years that followed, blockbuster action movies increasingly focused on existing intellectual property, interconnected universes, and franchise continuity.
Wanted also came from a comic, and Universal almost certainly hoped it might lead to sequels. But the movie now feels like one of the last gasps of a different impulse that studios now seem to balk at today: Spend blockbuster money on an R-rated, self-contained action fantasy with bizarre vibes, then let it be as excessive and ridiculous as possible. Modern blockbusters break the laws of physics constantly, but they would never dare to construct an entire mythology around a murder loom and propose that anyone can redirect a bullet by swinging a gun hard enough.
At the same time, Wanted looks and feels surprisingly prescient. Six years before John Wick introduced its underground society of contract killers, Wesley entered a secret world governed by rituals, codes, and an entire economy of assassination. Both movies choreograph gunplay and combat. The key difference is that John Wick makes its mythology cool through restraint, grounding it somewhat in reality. Wanted refuses restraint altogether. Wanted is John Wick with the taste and impulse control of a teenage boy, which is probably why this former teenage boy and his friends loved it so much back in the day — and why I still curve the bullet whenever I play some Wiffle ball.
