Wanted

Doormat Wesley Gibson is an office worker whose life is going nowhere. He meets an attractive woman named Fox and discovers that his recently murdered father - whom Wesley never knew - belonged to the Fraternity, a secret society of assassins which takes its orders from Fate itself. Fox and Sloan, the Fraternity's leader, teach Wesley, through intense training, to tap into dormant powers and hone his innate killing skills. Though he enjoys his newfound abilities, he begins to suspect that there is more to the Fraternity than meets the eye.

Wanted lands somewhere between trashy spectacle and genuinely inventive action filmmaking, and critics couldn't agree on which side won out. Most acknowledged the film's relentless kinetic energy and the performances, particularly McAvoy and Jolie, while splitting sharply over whether the gleefully absurd violence and paper-thin plotting amounted to dumb fun or something more cynically contemptible. European critics were notably harsher, and those familiar with the source comic felt the adaptation lost both the original's satirical edge and its willingness to implicate the audience.