So yes, Fox shot herself (and a ton of other people) in the head at the end of Wanted. But that doesn't mean she can't return, says Bekmambetov:

We are working hard to wake her up. She was deadly wounded. The bullet's still there (in her head), and now it's a process of how to wake her up. There has to be a reason for that. We survive if we have a reason to live. She decided [to shoot herself], it's her decision. And now we are trying to figure out what's the motivation for her to resurrect. It's happening. I think we will make it happen.

So they're not undoing the gunshot wound to the head, or showing her in flashbacks, or bringing her forward in time or anything. Instead, they're sticking to the gonzo anything-can-happen, power-of-the-human-mind spirit of the original, by having her recover from a deadly bullet wound through sheer will power. Which, really, is as it should be.

Timur Bekmambetov was doing interviews for his stitchpunk movie 9, but we'll have plenty more on that later.

Other great moments in our little clips reel: Angelina freaks out because she's been injected with a liquid explosive, and it turns out if she gets too far away from her creators, she goes haywire. (This is according to her mentor Mercy (Jack Palance) who appears in this scene as lips on the TV screen. And yes, it's Palance that Elias Koteas is calling "hot lips," not Jolie.) She also beats the crap out of an Asian fortune-teller/hacker, and then gets roped by the aforementioned lady hacker, who wears garter belt and stockings to go cyborg hunting. (Who wouldn't?) [IMDB]

The report by the ASA was troubled by the message given by the posters:

We noted Angelina Jolie, an actress generally recognised as being glamorous, featured in both ads and in ad (a) the gun she held featured prominently. We noted James McAvoy's character appeared in an action pose in ad (a) and the guns he held were pointed towards the reader; and that several guns were depicted in ad (b).

We noted one of the guns in ad (b) had recently fired, a moving bullet was shown and the ad featured other images related to the use of guns, including a bullet sprayed target; furthermore, Angelina Jolie was shown, holding a gun, in a pose that may be considered provocative. We noted the prominent text used in ad (b), "6 WEEKS AGO, I WAS JUST LIKE YOU ... AND THEN I MET HER ... AND MY WORLD WAS CHANGED FOREVER", in conjunction with some of the smaller text, suggested James McAvoy's character's life had changed for the better since he had become an assassin.

You almost want to read a review of the actual movie by the person who wrote this report, don't you? "And then it appeared that Morgan Freeman, an American actor of no little import, used the word 'motherfucker' multiple times before discharging his weapon in a manner that suggested he was displeased."

In the end, the ASA agreed that the posters glamorized the use of guns and were unsuitable for children, but not for adults:

However, we considered most members of the public would understand that the posters reflected the content of an action film. We therefore concluded they were unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.

The clear implication being that British children, apparently, can't tell the difference between movies and reality these days. Personally, I think that they should rise up in protest. Preferably using guns and screaming "We can't help it, we saw the posters for Wanted" in high, pre-pubescent voices.

[ASA Adjudications, Via]

Call this the summer of Chuck — we're suddenly ass-deep in movies about pathetic nerds who suddenly become super-spies or super-assassins. Get Smart was the story of Steve Carrell's analyst who pores over his computers and analyzes obscure "chatter", until he gets his chance to prove himself as a spy. Both Incredible Hulk and Iron Man had nerd-boy heroes whose experiments turn them into powerhouses. But Wanted may be the first summer escapist movie whose hero is just a weedy accountant.

As you may be able to tell, I'm somewhat conflicted about Wanted. Even star James McAvoy admitted, on the Daily Show, that reading the movie's script he thought it "could just be another awful action film." He only took the gig because he knew that director Timur Bekmambetov was an "evil genius." And he is. That pretty much sums up Wanted: toilet-paper script, poetically wonderful action sequences.

In Wanted, McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, an office peon who's terrorized by his fat binge-eating boss — who's a caricature straight out of a 1980s Twisted Sister video. She harangues him, clicking her stapler next to his ear, and making impossible demands until he has a panic attack and snarfs anti-anxiety meds like candy. Meanwhile, when his whiny girlfriend isn't waking him up by bitching at him, she's fucking Wesley's vapid best friend on the table Wesley bought her. McAvoy's running voice-over, and cartoony touches like an ATM that calls Wesley a broke asshole, hammer home his loser status. He's surrounded by dumb bitches, and they're dragging him down. If only he could meet a woman with a killer bod and no personality whatsoever, apart from a vapid smirk. Enter Angelina Jolie.

And here's where it starts to veer away from its source material, the graphic novel written by Mark Millar. It turns out Wesley's the son of a super-assassin, a member of an assassin "Fraternity" led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). And those anxiety attacks that he's been medicating himself for? Turns out they're actually his super-senses kicking in, allowing him to slow down his perceptions to the point where he can shoot the wings off a fly. They only work when his heart rate accelerates to 400 bpm — making Wesley the second hero of a recent movie who gets superpowers when his pulse races (the first being Bruce Banner, of course.)

So Wesley has the raw power of gun-fu (including the ability to curve a bullet's trajectory) but he needs to be broken down and rebuilt as a bad-ass. The movie takes us through a long boot-camp sequence, including plenty of montages, showing Wesley training and getting the crap beaten out of him over and over again. He gets smashed up a zillion times, and it's lucky the Fraternity has a nice healing bath instead of the traditional hot-tub. Wesley's a loser. He's a pussy. He's a nothing wimp. He's a fucking nothing. The breaking-Wesley sequences are lovingly over-the-top, including a knife expert who slices Wesley up in a room full of hanging animal carcasses. Finally, after being beaten to a pulp for the hundredth time, Wesley confesses that he doesn't know who he is — and within seconds, Freeman's Sloan swoops in and starts the process of building him up again.

The rest of the movie is a pretty standard action movie about Wesley going after the guy who he thinks killed his father. And the Fraternity turns out not to be what it seems: it has a whole cockamamie backstory about monks a thousand years ago who learned to read binary code in the threads from a special loom, but the real story turns out to be even more cockamamie than that. It's just bursting with cockamamie. Everything rockets towards a completely ludicrous conclusion that will make you feel like your head is full of rocks. Visually, Wanted is comparable to a Tarantino movie, but I would have killed for some of Kill Bill's sharp writing.

So, like I mentioned, Wanted's saving grace is the direction from Bekmambetov, who also directed Nightwatch and Daywatch. He brings a Ringo Lam-esque flair to endless scenes of knife fights in a meat forest, shootouts and car-train-gun battles. Actually, it's not just the action — pretty much every scene in the movie is shot hyper-kinetically and with super-emphasis. If you're in this movie's target demographic, you've probably seen the clips and trailers with the cars flipping over and the slow-motion shooting, or Jolie splayed on the hood of a car Death Proof-style, shooting like a maniac. The whole movie's like that.

This would probably be a good movie to see on crystal meth.

What's more, Bekmambetov does such a good job with the cartoony visuals that you almost don't care if the movie makes sense, or is vaguely evil. It's just a fantastic spectacle, brilliantly shot violence porn with smatterings of real porn. If the Fraternity really existed, and it needed a legion of couch potatoes to serve as cannon-fodder, it could totally use this movie as a recruiting video. It's pure thrilling escapism, with hardly any of the "great responsibility" angst that usually laces escapist fare. What's more, it has total conviction, thanks to a mostly solid cast: you believe that these people are bad-asses who really enjoy killing. And McAvoy makes Wesley's transition from droolbag to super-killer totally believable.

A lot of the film's marketing revolves around the sexiness of Angelina Jolie, but there's no sexual tension between her and McAvoy, or anyone else. We stare at her naked ass, but she acts as though all she thinks about is killing. She's sublimated all of her sexuality into her gun, and the only time she's sexual is when she's using sex to get something. (She does make out with Wesley in front of his weaselly ex-girlfriend, but you get the sense she's just doing Wesley a favor.)

As I said, Wanted isn't too subtle about embodying the fantasy of breaking free of the mindless service job and escaping from the nagging bitches to become a real man. (Early on, Wesley's voiceover talks about his repetitive strain injury, but it never keeps him from practicing the same gun move a few thousand times.) It's significant that the Fraternity's headquarters is a textile factory — obviously it's partly because the factory houses the Loom of Fate, but it's also meant to contrast with Wesley's dumb office. Wesley's stupid "customer account manager" job is emasculating because he doesn't make anything, he doesn't work with his hands, and he just moves bullshit pieces of information around. The Fraternity, meanwhile, works among giant machines, they're manly garment workers who create a physical product. If you want to be a real man, the movie suggests, you should ditch the pointless symbolic labor of the cubicle farm and haul the moldering corpse of the manufacturing economy out of its grave.

So, bottom line: Wanted works great as a fun, fluffy action movie. It's not up to the standard of Tarantino or any of the great Hong Kong or Japanese directors, partly because nobody in the film is particularly likable. And it may annoy you if you're not in its target demographic. But if you're looking for a fun shoot-em-up with a huge dose of high-energy escapism, it's pretty much perfect for what it is.

Over at Comic Book Resources, the official (or so it claims, anyway) first review of the movie starts by letting comic fans know what not to expect from the upcoming Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy movie:

For those familiar with Mark Millar and JG Jones’ comic, you're going to see it very accurately reflected for about twenty minutes, before the film then goes on its own wild ride, though with a few snags and bulletholes from the original. It ditched the supervillains, it ditches the "bad guys won," it ditches the celebration of amorality of the lead. But for all the themes and dubious morality it ditches, it grows its own.

This is apparently what happens when the movie writers hadn't read the end of the comic before writing the script. Not that the movie seems to suffer from straying so far from what the faithful would've expected:

[W]hat’s most gorgeous about "Wanted" is the tone. The language, the visuals, the effects, have their tongue so far in cheek it triggers the gag reflex (in a good way). The film spends huge amounts of money, time and effort telling basic jokes. But they’re far funnier as a result and fuel this rollercoaster of a ride with an energy lacking in the dour Wachowski movies. This is an adult superhero comedy masquerading as an action flick. It’s fresh, it’s fast, it’s funny and it’s one hell of a surprise. It really sells the whole "mundanity vs madness" theme running through the film, from the cascading cereal packets to the bizarre camera-mounted handguns.

Over on British site Entertainment Wise, they're in agreement with some of the above, at least:

[T]here’s a lot of fun to be had here - no shocks, but a lot of big bangs, blood spurting and some genuinely funny gags... Wanted is a great ride - bullets, babes, and tonnes of wish fulfilment for the frustrated male 9-to-fiver. However, it takes itself far too seriously, especially given its very silly script (again, we point you to the ‘shoot the fly’ scene). Great fun for a Saturday night, or for a slow weeknight when it’s out on DVD, but not the action movie reinvention that the brilliant trailers promised.

The movie gets released on June 27th, meaning that there are still 10 days for critics to announce that the movie glorifies violence and is a threat to society.

Wanted - The First Review [Comic Book Resources]
Wanted [Entertainment Wise]

[HD Trailer at MySpace]

So now that we solved the problem about the individual spoiler pages turning up in your RSS feed, we've decided to try this new format for the next week. Let us know how you're liking it. I thought it was a good sign that we had comment threads happening in the individual spoiler posts, which wouldn't show up on the front page as featured comments. Also, this gets around the "videos all start playing at once" problem. But let me know what you think!

Avatar:
Wanted:
The Dark Knight:
Doctor Who:
Lost:
Heroes:
Fringe:
Marvel Secret Invasion:

Jolie also posed for the latest cover of Vanity Fair. It's not really a spoiler, but here it is anyway:

Extended version of Wesley-Meets-Fox scene:

Wesley is at a cash register inside a grocery store. Fox (Angelina Jolie) approaches Wesley and says, "Your father died yesterday on the roof of the Metropolitan building....sorry. The man who killed him is right behind you." Cue heart beat sound effects and slow motion fire fight sequence. An unnamed gunman is trying to take out both Wesley and Fox. Fox is carrying a gigantic wrap-around gun with a corner video. (Which means she can shoot around the corner without having to peek over.) The fire fight goes back and forth while shoppers scream and run out of the way, until it spills out onto the street. Fox hops into her red Viper and literally picks up Wesley by opening the car door and donut spinning the car into him. Needless to say Wesley is not happy and begs Fox, " I don't know what you did to piss that guy off... Could you let me out at the next corner?" The chase ensues complete with gratuitous and completely fulfilling car flips, which compliment the one minute shoot-out Fox does while hanging from outside the car window (in motion of course). We also discover that the scary unnamed gunman can shoot bullets around objects without the help of Fox's fancy gun.

Deleted Scene: An Introduction

Timur explained that this scene was cut because it took too long to explain Wesley's heart condition. Wesley's heart beats at 400 bpm and allows him access to much more adrenaline than a normal human, which is why he can become a member of the elite assassins. Wesley awakes in an unknown hideout home to Sloan and his gang. With out a second to lose Sloan orders Wesley to shoot the wings off a fly hovering above a waste basket, to add incentive the Gunsmith (played by the rapper Common) shoves another amazing looking pistol/sniper gun in the back of Wesley's noggin. Wesley under immense pressure (and with the sound of his heart pumping) responds and shoots off the tiny wings off all the flies. Sloan brings over the wingless flies to Wesley and tells him that if he can learn to harness his adrenaline he can use it, and then lays it on thick telling him there's a 'Caged lion locked inside and he needs to find the key to release it.' Wesley is then given his late poppa's gun and told that the assassins want him to kill the man who killed his father.

When asked why the characters weren't dressed in their superhero-esque attire (most notable Fox's lack of ears) Timur responded, " There are so many movies where the characters are in costume. I think it's better now because you can focus on how they are different on the inside not the outside. It was a concept to ground the fantasy world. It's a real world super assassins in it. Can you imagine a super assassin walking down in a costume? Everyone would know you are a super assassin. It's not very professional."

Oh and if you think tattoos are sexy, you'll love Angelina Jolie in this, because she's got about 100 black tribal and lettered tatts all over her hands and body.

Here is Oswalt on Lucas:

I want to kill George Lucas with a shovel. Okay, let me clarify, I don't want to kill him now because he adopted some kids and he's got that beard to take care of, but I want to go back to 1992 and just beat him to death with a shovel. Star Wars is fucking awesome, but I just want to prevent the prequels, that's all I want to do. Let's imagine I just ran into him in 1992:

"Oh my god! You're George Lucas! I just want to say you're amazing, I love you! Star Wars is awesome. Just.. thank you."

"Well, you say you like Star Wars? You know I'm about to start working on some prequels."

"Wait, you mean, you're gonna do Chapters One through Three? Oh my god! YES! I've been waiting so long for this!"

"So, do you like Darth Vader?"

"Do I like Darth Vader? Oh god I LOVE Darth Vader! With the cape and the mask and the lightsaber? He's a badass!"

"Well, in the first movie you get to see him as a little kid."

"I... what? Wait, you mean he's like Damien in the Omen, right? He's going around killing people with his mind and stuff right?"

"Well, no he's just a little kid and he gets taken away from his mommy and he's very sad."

"Yeah, well...I kind of like the helmet and the cape and the sword, you know?"

"Well don't worry about that because guess who's in the second movie? Boba Fett!"

"Holy shit! Boba Fett?! That's even better than Darth! With the suit of armor and that helmet and the cool ship? He's a badass bounty hunter!"

"Yeah, and in the second movie, you get to see him as a little kid!"

"Wait.. what? So you mean he's got the helmet on and he's shooting people and stuff, right?"

"No, he's just a little kid and his daddy dies and he's very sad."

"Oh. Well, I kind of just like where he's a bounty hunter and he's shooting people and stuff."

"Well, don't worry about any of that because guess what's in the third movie... the Death Star!"

"Oh my fucking god, the Dea... wait a minute. What is it doing?"

"Well, it's just being built and Darth Vader is looking at it."

"I kind of just like it when it's done and it's blowing up planets and stuff. I don't really care how they put the air conditioning and the toilets in, you know?"

"You seem very sad."

"Yes, you're right. I don't give a fuck about any of that stuff. That sounds... horrible! I would never go see that."

"Would you like a dish of ice cream?"

"Why, yes I would l like some ice cream. That would be very nice!"

"Well here's a big sack of rock salt!"

"What? You said I'd be getting ice cream?"

"Well, when you add the cream and sugar and ice and do a little mixing and then presto, you have ice cream!"

"I DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE! Hey, do you love Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a big boner? Well then here's Jon Voight's ballsack! That's right! The sweaty, pink ballsack she swam out of. Now jerk off to that, you lucky so and so!"