Wanted staring James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, Morgan Freeman as Sloan, and the sexy tattooed Angelina Jolie as Fox, didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Yes, it was a suburb action movie. And don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of it. However, it left me a little bit cold once the lights came up and the credits had finished rolling.

Warning! – If you haven’t seen the movie and are planning on it, don’t read any further. Go see the movie, enjoy Fox’s short nude scene and the amazing gun battles, and then come back and read my blah blah blah…

Wesley Gibson is a cube jockey that suffers from what he thinks are intense panic attacks. They debilitate to the point where is unable to stand up for himself in anyway. At work he is pray to a boss with a low-self esteem who lashes out at those she perceives to be weaker. At home, he his girl friend pushes him around and sleeps with his best friend. His life is complete crap.

Then one day, a seemingly normal day (Don’t all movies like this start out on a normal day?) that quickly becomes life changing, Wesley is thrown into a fight between The Fraternity and a rogue assassin. Wesley quickly, I think too quickly, embraces his newly discovered talents. There was only a moment where he hesitated, tried to go back to his mundane life.

I don’t know what I wanted here, but Wesley seemed to embrace his new life and exit his old one far too quickly. I wanted more character development, more choice.

Wesley did have his Red Pill / Blue Pill moment. Once he agreed to begin training, he went through a Fight Club style hazing. He was tied to a chair and beaten until he was able to voice his real reason for wanting to join The Fraternity.

I have to say that I liked the training part of the movie, but on some level, I just did not buy that Wesley could so quickly transform into such an effective killing machine in such a short time. I think that it could have easily been fixed with a little more attention to how the passage of time was portrayed. As it is now, you have to believe more than a few days have passed. I would have liked to have seen some signifiers that his training took time. I don’t know how much time, but in order to have mastered the fighting arts as seen in the movie, perhaps a year (I don’t know, perhaps that would have made him less super.)

The one thing that I’m still out on is that The Fraternity took its orders from Fate. Fate spoke to The Fraternity through binary as woven into a large tapestry. It is an interesting idea, a Faith based on loom that spells names. I also liked how easily the faithful could be led astray by Sloan’s devious misinterpretations.

Which brings me to the end of the movie, the climax. Sloan reveals that every member of The Fraternity’s name had come up when Wesley produced Sloan’s own. Fox being the true believer fulfilled Fate’s mission killing the remaining assassins and her self with one bullet. It was a good scene, I’ll admit it. However, I don’t like that ending. It is too simple. It raped everything up to neatly.

Yes, the movie does not stop there. Wesley has his revenge on Sloan, but where does that leave the story. I guess that I’m becoming addicted to the never ending sequels. I want more. I want a bigger story. I want to know what Wesley will do next. Will he rebuild The Fraternity? I just don’t know.

Side note: Fox is the hottest character that Angelina Jolie has played to date. Her Tattoos are amazing. I sure hope that there is a prequel or a movie about how she joined up with The Fraternity. I think that it would even be a better story than Wanted.

The Soulless Machine