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esrblog and I just got back from seeing Wanted, the new film starring Angelina Jolie by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov.

Describing Wanted, with or without spoilers, is hard. I think Anthony Lane, who reviewed the movie for "The New Yorker" magazine, came up with the best description. He said that, judging by Wanted, Bekmambetov must make his morning coffee this way. He starts by throwing a fistful of coffee beans in the air. Then, he takes a pistol and blasts them into powder. After that, he races downstairs to the curb and wrenches open a fire hydrant, directing the resulting flood into his apartment as he does so. Finally, he sets fire to the building and, as the heated water floats through the coffee particles, catches the drops of coffee on his tongue.

Nothing like that happens in Wanted, but Lane's mythological description of Bekmambetov's coffee brewing is a great metaphor for the movie. It's every bit as much over the top as that method of making java. It also has a lot of action--car crashes, things getting smashed up and blown up. Unlike the typical summer movie, it asks some very good, hard questions about what it means to have a destiny, and the choices one has to make to take control of one's life.

There's a little more I'd like to say about the movie, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers I'll put it under an LJ-cut.

Even though it's set in Chicago and has a very American ambiance, there's some deeply Russian themes in Wanted. In some ways, protagonist Wesley Gibson is an inverse Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Dostevesky's classic novel "Crime and Punishment". Like Gibson, Raskolnikov is living a desperate failure of a life. Eventually, Raskolnikov conceives the idea that if he is truly a superior being, he can murder to improve his lot with impunity. (In Gibson's case, he has a genetic trait that makes it possible to be a super-assassin--and is recruited by the same super-assassin guild his father had worked, and died, for.)

Raskolnikov, however, was wrong; he was not the kind of superior being who can murder casually just to get enough coin to survive, and guilt finally forces him to try to atone for his crime. Gibson, on the other hand, *is* at least a physically superior being, and he succeeds--albeit in a bizarre way--of taking control of his life by violence where Raskolnikov fails. (There's also a lot of dark humor generated as Gibson uses his newly-trained abilities to take dramatic but non-fatal revenge on the coworkers who humiliated him back at the cubicle farm where he once labored.)

It's an interesting question whether Gibson does, in the end, make the right choices about who to kill, and why, but despite all the blood Wanted is an amazing amount of fun. If you don't mind violence, and total flouting of the laws of physics (these assassins can make the bullets they fire curve around obstacles), Wanted is great summer amusement. If you, like many Russians, enjoy debating moral conundrums, Wanted is still the movie for you.

And, finally, if you enjoy watching Angelina Jolie in action, go see this picture. I've finally figured out what her niche in modern cinema is. She's an action hero. Not an action *heroine*--an action hero. Though she's very female indeed. She's also sexy, though she's not particularly pretty or beautiful. esrblog thinks she was incredibly sexy in this picture, strutting around with a gun on her hip (which was often in her hand as well).