I’ve learned not to trust the reactions of audiences at preview screenings as any barometer of a movie’s quality or box-office potential. I’m not sure whether it’s because viewers feel more charitable since they didn’t pay to see the film or because they’re hopped up on goofballs, but they can be a little too game at times. Worse yet, I find myself easily swayed by their enthusiasm. I remember sitting through a lively screening of What Planet Are You From? eight years ago and thinking, “Wow, this’ll totally be a hit!” Halfway through Showgirls I said to my date, “My god, the vibe in here is electric. I smell Oscar!” After Waterworld, I was moved to yell at the screen, “You da man, Kevin Costner!” before doing an Arsenio Hall fist roll.

While I managed to (mostly) keep it together while watching Wanted, fellow patrons were more vocal about their appreciation of what is surely the summer’s most gonzo action blockbuster. In the brief moment of calm that follows a centrepiece scene of exquisitely choreographed carnage involving many bullets, a car, a passenger train and two very steep mountain sides, I heard my awestruck neighbour collect his jaw from the floor and murmur a thoroughly unironic “holy shit.” A few moments later, a canny reversal in the plotline elicited a collective and equally genuine gasp. The implication was unmistakable: Wanted may be overblown nonsense but it is also the kind of audacious, ingenious and utterly compelling nonsense that keeps one hand on a viewer’s throat and the other on his or her nether parts.

Timur Bekmambetov has mastered that particular hold. Like the Kazakh director’s Russian-made fantasy pics Night Watch and Day Watch, Wanted can seem shamelessly derivative of its inspirations (most obviously Fight Club for its use of narration and Every-wuss hero, The Matrix for everything else) but it has such force, propulsion and imagination, it hardly matters. And though Wanted is not Bekmambetov’s first English-language film — that would be The Arena (2001), a Roger Corman–produced lady-gladiator exploitation flick — he’s one of the few foreign directors of recent note to make a big-budget Hollywood movie that’s as idiosyncratic as his hits with the hometown crowd.

Just as surprising is how well suited James McAvoy is to his task here. The Atonement star achieves just the right note of nebbishy in the film’s early scenes as Wesley, a gutless, self-loathing salaryman. In lieu of Tyler Durden comes Fox (Angelina Jolie), a comely assassin who rescues Wesley not just from his life of drudgery but the mystery man (Thomas Kretschmann) who killed his father the day before. As he learns from his new mentor Sloan (Morgan Freeman), Wesley is literally a born killer, a member of a millennium-old organization of assassins known as the Fraternity. It’s up to him to realize his potential as he begins his training, much of which involves taking a major pounding.

Adapted from the comic series by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones (though the source has been tweaked substantially by Cellular screenwriter Chris Morgan and the 3:10 to Yuma team of Michael Brandt and Derek Haas), the script features a familiar but pleasingly straightforward blend of glossed-up Manichaeism, high-stakes standoffs and daddy issues. Of course, Wesley’s tale is most stirring during the action sequences, and Bekmambetov serves a generous helping of post-Matrix ultra-violence with uncommon panache. The laws of Newtonian physics are no obstacle here — instead, these killers jump across buildings and shoot the wings off flies.

Twice we see them make their cars flip sideways 360 degrees and then keep on driving.
Yet even the wildest stunts are given some degree of plausibility thanks to McAvoy’s pluck and Bekmambetov’s ability to cover up the limitations of the CGI with time-honoured tactics like slow-mo, zooms and the pause/burst/pause editing style so beloved by Hong Kong’s greatest action auteurs. Bekmambetov also has a newcomer’s eye for the casual absurdity of the American urban landscape — somehow, it doesn’t seem strange that the first big car chase involves a pet-food delivery truck decorated with kittens. Thankfully, he doesn’t get too cute with the visual gimmickry or the script’s strains of satire and even self-parody.

Really, Wanted is only undone by Jolie’s rote vamp act and the feeling that we’ve seen its less inspired scenes too many times already — after all, Wanted shares its gene pool not just with The Matrix but more shameless retreads like Equilibrium, The One and Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever. Which is not to suggest that my audience expressed any reservations. Halfway through the screening, I said to my date, “My god, the vibe in here is electric. I smell Oscar!” I realize now it was only nachos.