Wanted

Timur Bekmambetov spends a long opening stretch of his 2008 film on Wesley being worn down in an office: anxiety pills, a cubicle, a shouting boss. Anyone who came for curving bullets waits that out. The film explains neither the wrist flick that bends a bullet nor the kill orders woven on a loom. Refuse either at the outset and nothing later wins you over. The ending reverses the order’s justification, so the long training stretch means something else in hindsight. The comic’s superhero costumes were cut back to the leather Wesley and Fox wear, and Mark Millar would have preferred the supervillain mythos to survive. James McAvoy was rejected as too unlike a leading man, then recalled because the producers wanted someone geeky. Angelina Jolie herself asked that Fox die by her own hand. The Fraternity’s loom hall was built inside a former sugar factory in Prague, and two full size rail cars were built, one for the run along the roof and one for the derailment, rolled on a hydraulic rig. A good fit if you take the wrist flick as a law of physics from the outset and want escalation instead of explanation. Not for you if the assassins’ organisation has to stay logically intact: the final turn erases the reason for every killing already shown.