Wanted

So, get this straight. Doodling in office, with an obese (always obese), obnoxious boss breathing down your neck, makes you a loser. However, if you had a gun, were an assassin with uncertain moral principles and sent a train full of passengers hurtling down a cliff, you could say you had done something with your life.

Once that is out of the way, you will have no problem with “Wanted”, a film almost delirious on adrenalin. Nothing is allowed in the way of non-stop action, least of all a plausible storyline, as long as the car chases, train-top walking, knife-fighting and gun-shooting are on course.

One thousand years ago, some weavers formed a society of assassins that calls itself the Fraternity (Why weavers? “Life”, you see, “hangs by a thread”). In the film, six weeks ago, that gang — or specifically Fox, played by Jolie, has come calling on Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), a frustrated accounts manager searching for meaning in life. Wesley’s father was apparently a member of the Fraternity who was killed by a rogue member recently, and the Fraternity believes he has in it him to be as good an assassin as his father and take revenge. Believe that? But then, remember, it’s Jolie telling the story.

They call themselves the Fraternity, but basically the group comprises Freeman as the leader Sloan and Jolie as the sexy Fox.

During the obligatory “training”, Wesley is bloodied and bruised enough number of times to leave anyone incapacitated. However, a dip in pasty-white water is all it takes for him to be good as new. So, one day, after he has satisfied himself about why he is here (“to maintain balance in the world”) and whether it is right (Fox has one cock and bull story to convince him), Wesley is one of the gang.

Who picks who dies? The names, it seems, are revealed in the weave of the loom of a textile mill, which still operates as the front of the Fraternity. Who puts them in? Little Johnny Thin, for all the film cares.

And that isn’t just the biggest weakness. For all of the action in “Wanted” and all of McAvoy’s appeal as the everyday man with few options, he can’t carry the film on his thin frame. The screenplay, loosely based on a comic book mini-series, doesn’t spend any time on explaining Sloan or Fox, or the sundry other Fraternity members who seem as varied a bunch as Bigg Boss could dream up.

And Freeman and Jolie treat the project with little more respect than a show put for audiences. While the former is again his godly self, with all-knowing mysterious half-smiles, Jolie knows this is the kind of role where her tattoos suffice. In one generous, very generous glimpse of them, some would say almost all is forgiven.