Wanted trailer!

I have to confess that, artwork and high-concept aside, I didn’t think much of Mark Millar’s comic WANTED, which features a “hero” who unfeelingly murders innocents, proudly talks about raping women, and spends the end of the book actually berating the reader for bothering with such egregious rubbish . You may feel differently (and please… don’t try to tell me I don’t “get” it), and so you might not be quite so satisfied with this new feature loosely based on the comic. But I’m not overly dismayed that the filmmakers took significant creative license with the source material.

The basic core idea seems relatively intact: James McAvoy plays a neurotic everyday working stiff who discovers (courtesy of Angelina Jolie — his day’s looking better!) that his recently deceased father was an infamous assassin who leaves his legacy, making the lad a default member in a secret society of killers.

That seems to be where the similarities end — gone are the colorful costumed supervillains who packed every panel in the comic, as well as the pointlessly nihilistic tone of the book (although it still feels like it desperately wants to be the next FIGHT CLUB, but discarding subtext in favor of ballistics). It appears to be replaced with some nonsensical business about slaying for fate and picking a side, but with direction from NIGHT WATCH guy Timur Bekmambetov, at least the visuals are slick.