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.

Updating fans on his Millarworld messageboard this weekend, Millar explained the Hollywood math surrounding the movie:

[H]ere's the deal... had this movie's opening weekend hit 30 million then we would have a sequel. Had it hit 35 I'm told that's a franchise. Advance tracking yesterday suggested we could be looking at 40. But after Friday night it looks like opening weekend could be upwards of 50 MILLION DOLLARS, with the movie scoring as high with women as men (unusual for an action movie, oddly, as all the girls I know love action movies). I thought we'd be in trouble up against that wee robot guy, but everything's going great.

As producers as well as creators, this obviously delights JG [Jones, co-creator of the comic] and I. We're discussing the idea of the overseas Fraternity led by Mister Rictus making a play for the US territory Morgan Freeman left behind (ie, the middle section of the book), but this is nothing more than chat at the moment. Nothing will be greenlit until final weekend numbers are in. It's all looking very, very good, though. Thanks for supporting us with your hard-earned dollars.

At time of writing, the movie looked set to have earned upwards of $51 million dollars on its opening weekend, which probably translates into "massive franchise you'll be sick of four movies later" or something.

Wanted's Opening Weekend Set To Break Records [Millarworld]

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.

MYTH: Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) and a few select others have a special, super-shooting ability that makes it possible for them to curve the trajectories of the bullets they shoot.

FACT: To change the movement of any object, external force must be involved — so says a little thing called Newton's First Law. After the initial impulse that propels a bullet from the barrel of a gun, a bullet's path will essentially follow a straight line. In long-range shooting, gravity will impose a downward acceleration on the bullet, causing the bullet to travel in a slight parabola. Air resistance, wind, and even the Coriolis effect might also affect the trajectory of the bullet (especially at long distances), but this is quite apart from Wanted's claim that bullets are able to dodge obstacles.

Of course, there's always the possibility that a simple bullet could be more than meets the eye. In 1998, two professors from California — Dr. Chih-Ming Ho of UCLA and Dr. Yu-Chong Tai of Caltech — published a landmark paper detailing their research into the possible application of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) to situations involving fluid flows. What they were exploring is the behavior of tiny transducers (sensors or actuators such as accelerometers or microflaps) that are surrounded by a fluid flow; these MEMS transducers could be as small as a thousandth of a millimeter, or one micrometer. With sophisticated enough micro-devices, a bullet might be able to detect, record, and control its own trail. Ho and Tai, however, are now focusing their research on biomedical applications, so McAvoy will have to look elsewhere.

MYTH: If you concentrate hard enough — and if you're as badass as Wesley Gibson — you can shoot the wings off a fly.

FACT: Let's leave aside for a moment the assumption that flies will remain perfectly still in politeness while you shoot them, and that small considerations like human error, weapon defects, and unpredictable air resistance won't affect the accuracy of a gunshot more than one millimeter. According to the Internet Movie Firearms Database, the gun that James McAvoy is most likely shooting in Wanted is either a Beretta 92 with 9x19mm Parabellum cartridges or a Heckler & Koch USP Compact pistol with .357 SIG cartridges. (In the side image, the Beretta cartridge is at the far left, while the .357 SIG is third from left.) For both these cartridges, the bullet diameter is 9 millimeters.

Wikipedia notes that the common adult housefly is 6-9 millimeters long, and any detailed pest control website will tell you that the wingspan of such a housefly ranges from 12-15 millimeters. This means that the wing of a single housefly, at most, is less than 7 millimeters. Good luck blowing the wings off and leaving the fly intact, Wesley, no matter how supernaturally accurate a shot you are.

Interested in more movie physics fallacies? Check out the Internet Movie Firearms Database for details on the exact guns used in your favorite films so that you can perform the proper calculations yourself — or just take a look at Intuitor's Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics to get an idea of common mistakes. Angelina Jolie can teach you a lot of things, but don't let her teach you physics.

Additional sources: Barrow Borough Council Pest Control, Valent BioSciences Environmental Science Division, and Special Topics MEMS: An Interview with Professor Chih-Ming Ho.

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]

According to InstantCast, while filming Wanted in Prague, the production crew assembled a large textile factory jam-packed with destiny looms. These are looms that create fabrics which are interwoven with the destinies of people. And it turns out there's a mythical land where all-seeing weavers determine the balance of the world. Let's all hope Wanted has more flipping vipers and bendy bullets, and less fancy loom analogies. [Wanted]

[HD Trailer at MySpace]