Adrenaline Rush! - Wanted

"Never send a sheep to kill a wolf"

Wanted(loosely based on the comic book by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones) is many things. It's a story about learning who you are, a story of redemption, and it's also story of having the balls to choose a life for yourself instead of letting the world choose one for you.

It's also about killing motherfuckers, car chases, explosions, bullet time, curving bullets, speeding trains, and a mystical code followed by a group of assassins for over a thousand years.

At the outset, Wesley Gibson(played by James Mcavoy) is a going no where loser. He works in a dead end office with a good for nothing boss, his girlfriend is banging his best friend in his own apartment, and he takes medication for frequent anxiety attacks. Wesley just doesn't really care about anything and he hates his day to day life.

This all changes when he meets an assassin named Fox(played by Angelina Jolie). he is told that his father who he never met was actually an elite assassin with special heightened abilities and that he was killed by a rogue assassin who happens to also be in the same convenience store where their conversation is taking place.

After a lengthy shootout and car chase, Wesley is told about a organization of assassins, known as the Fraternity, have been killing selected people for over a thousand years in hopes of making the world a balanced place. They get these kill orders from a mystical code found inside fabric being made by a machine known as the Loom of Fate.

This starts off a balls out action packed adventure that finds Wesley joining the Fraternity and learning how to use his own special abilities so that he can eventually find and kill the man that killed his father. The unique thing about the Fraternity is the powers that members possess. Wesley learns that he too has powers passed down by his father. He learns that he can not only speed up his own adrenaline and reflexes to give him a special bullet time effect, but he can also curve bullets around objects to hit targets not directly in his line of sight. Only a select few people in the world can do these things and that is why Wesley is a prized addition to the Fraternity's team.

Wanted's action scenes are insane. They are a ballet of bullets, slow motion, and destruction. Bullets curve and even collide in mid air. Windows and doors often get jumped through or shot at and shatter sending glass all over the place. Stuff in the characters surroundings just generally gets beat the hell up pretty badly and that gives Wanted a very visceral feel and because of that it always feels fun. Wanted also has some fantastic vehicle focused scenes.

It all moves at a good pace too with a running time of 1 hour and 50 mins. It never feels like anything should of been left on the cutting room floor and it never feels like you need anything more than you are getting. It's a perfect molding of story, character development, and action. It all just feels very right.

Wanted was released in Theaters on June 27th, 2008 and on DVD and Bluray Disc on December 2nd, 2008

- Wanted on Netflix