Along came the Fox

Wanted (MA15+) 2½ stars National release THE best thing about Wanted, a brutally violent and overwrought adaptation of a series of comic strips by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, is Scottish actor James McAvoy, who plays, with surprising conviction, a wimp transformed into a professional assassin.

Foxy lady has some home truths for the film's young hero

Wanted (MA15+) 2½ stars National release THE best thing about Wanted, a brutally violent and overwrought adaptation of a series of comic strips by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, is Scottish actor James McAvoy, who plays, with surprising conviction, a wimp transformed into a professional assassin.

Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) hates his life; he hates his office job and overbearing boss (Lorna Scott), and he hates the fact that his live-in girlfriend (Kristen Hager) is having sex with his best friend (Chris Pratt). But he can't bring himself to do anything about any of his troubles, until the day he's confronted by the beautiful, tattooed Fox (Angelina Jolie), who saves him from Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), the killer who, Fox tells him, murdered his father.

Fox, like the dead father, works for the Fraternity, a secret society of assassins led by the calmly avuncular Morgan Freeman (whose approach to this kind of role is getting a bit stale) and Wesley eventually agrees to undergo the most brutal training imaginable to become an assassin and avenge his father's killing.

In the meantime there are car chases galore, plenty of killings, and a climax set on a passenger train that teeters over a ravine somewhere in eastern Europe, not to mention the plot twists, which come thick and fast but don't make the story any more believable.

Wanted is the first Hollywood film directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Kazakh-born director of the Russian films Night Watch and Day Watch. He seizes all the opportunities afforded him by a bigger budget and the world's greatest computer-generated effects, but what he can't succeed in doing is making this disagreeable yarn plausible or, indeed, very interesting. Thank goodness for McAvoy, who proved in The Last King of Scotland and Atonement that he's an actor well worth watching. He deserves better than this.