Wanted 4K 2008

"You're nothing. Your boss at the office just makes fun of you. Your best friend has been screwing your girlfriend for a long time. You know it, and you don't say a word," was the message the ATM gave Wesley Gibson when he asked for his balance. It's all true. Wesley Gibson is a worthless office worker, leading a miserable, aimless existence. He is plagued by anxiety attacks and heart palpitations. His father abandoned his mother before he was born.

But one day at a drugstore, Wesley is approached by a charming woman who tells him that his father was a legend--the world's greatest liquidator--and that Wesley has inherited from him extraordinary abilities he doesn't even know about. From this moment on, Wesley's fate will take a steep turn.

'Particularly Dangerous' is a stunning film: that's the most succinct definition for it. Timur Bekmambetov has revolutionized cinema in a small way, filming the classic comic book story of how someone who was nothing becomes 'our everything,' in a harshly realistic way. "Particularly Dangerous" is the first big screen adaptation of an "adult" R-rated comic book, and it's a real challenge.

Timur Bekmambetov is such a Tamerlane of modern cinema: his triumphal march from 'Kazakhs to Vikings, then everywhere else' with 'Dozors' and a sequel to 'Irony of Fate' has so far ended in Hollywood, and who knows where else he will wind up. "Particularly Dangerous," despite its hundred-million-dollar budget and other niceties, is a surprisingly auteur-driven film. Like Timur's previous films, 'Worthed' is full of daring visual choices, but unlike the motley 'Watchmen' with their penny-pinching effects, all the experiments in 'Worthed' are surprisingly well-crafted, stunning and successful. In part because of this, 'Wanted' is an ultimatum movie: after it you don't want to watch any other. Only 'Worthed' can be better than 'Worthed,' yes.

As always, to really enjoy a movie, visual beauties alone are not enough. And 'Wanted' is, above all, not a special effect, but a powerful dramatic story with a huge number of funny moments.

The first two-thirds of the movie causes such bursts of laughter in the audience that even after the laughter subsides, hysterical squeals and sobs can be heard in some places. It is an exceptional talent for a filmmaker to talk funny about serious things, because it is much harder to make you laugh than it is to make you cry. Toward the end, the movie gets dramatic, it's no laughing matter. But in general, "Wanted" is made with some magical rhythmic harmony: it is impossible to tear yourself away from the screen, it requires a full concentration.

One of the key in the work of Timur Bekmambetov has always been the theme of fatherhood - and the connection of generations as a consequence. In "Particularly Dangerous" this theme is also of great and weighty importance. Borges, in his time, reduced the plots of all possible works to four main ones: the defense of a fortified city, the wandering in search of purpose, the hero's return to himself, and the suicide of a god. "Particularly Dangerous" falls under this classification: Wesley Gibson, in the film, returns to himself from the semantic dead end in which he is stuck. Not so long ago in Neil Marshall's intrepid female major Eden Sinclair was finding her place in space - but 'Won'ted' is more about finding your place in time: where you come from and why. In a narrow, purely psychological sense, "Wanted" is a movie about a boy becoming his father's son-a man.