On the surface, Wanted is a badass idea. You take a normal schmuck, give him superhuman reaction times and strength, and the ability to bend bullets. It's like The Matrix, or Equilibrium, but with bullet bending! Unfortunately, that seems to be as far as the directors got, though they did throw in a bucket (or seven) of fake blood.

The movie is shallow, unrealistic, and just plain silly at times. It starts out with a short introduction of the hero, who is an accounts manager with a terrible, horrible life. Plagued by panic attacks, he suffers through the verbal abuse of his obese, annoying boss while suffering through the emotional abuse of his best friend and cubicle-mate screwing his girlfriend. He's also broke, and hates himself. Sounds like a real winner!

Soon the movie introduces the main plot point, which involves a sniper rifle bullet exiting a man's forehead in super slow motion. It's stupid, it's unrealistic, it's kind of gross, and it does nothing to add to the plot that a more subdued blood splatter would have. This, in general, is the way the movie's scenes play out. They're overly violent, but not in a good way. Some movies are "overly violent" because their subject matter is overly violent. When you see someone's head get cut off in Gladiator, it's because that's what happened in the Colosseum. When you see someone get a piece of rebar shoved through their chest in close-up slow motion in Wanted, it's because they hadn't shown an internal organ in 19 seconds.

All the action scenes in the movie take the same kind of approach. You have multiple people, each with superhuman powers, doing unbelievable violence to everyone within half a mile. Entire bus loads of people are killed for no reason other than it was convenient for setting up the next bit of action. This threw up a big red flag in my mind. The "good guys" in this movie are the brotherhood of assassins that are mentioned in the trailer. However, they believe they are the weapons of fate, and they only target people that fate has prescribed. You know, those people AND any bystanders within 500 yards.

Also, the movie is highly derivative. When I said before that the concept sounds like The Matrix meets Equilibrium, it looks like that too. There's a Matrix Lobby scene, an Equilibrium Hallway scene, and even an Equilibrium styled hand to hand gun battle. Except instead of just getting shot, the bad guys wait for the camera to zoom in before hemorrhaging all over the lens.

One of the final scenes of the movie involves a character shooting a handgun in such a way that the bullet travels in a perfect circle through a room, killing almost a dozen people. Now, I'm all for a movie being consistent. If you want me to believe they have super human reflexes and can "curve" bullets, that's fine. But you can't shoot a bullet in a circle, and even if you could it won't continue to fly properly after going through TWENTY FIVE SKULL BONES.

There are some parts of the movie that stick with the style of the comics. At one point someone is smacked in the face with a keyboard, and the flying letters spell out "fuck you" as they fly past the camera. That was very reminiscent of an over-stylized comic book. I also understand that the gore may also be a part of the style of the original books, but to me it was dumb.

The storyline is alright. I won't spoil it, but it's fairly standard Hollywood fare for a movie like this. All in all though, it was a bad movie. As soon as it was over my wife and I looked at each other and said "wow, that was a BAD movie." Then we watched Wall-E, which was significantly better.

(PS Review: Wall-E is WIN, also Blockbuster has a new policy where you can rent any of their movies for $2 for 24 hours. We got Wall-E and Wanted for $4.50)