Wanted: A Review

There are times in movies when the desire to wrestle with interesting ideas must compete with the (often deeper) desire to look cool. Wanted is just such a film. For the first two acts, it seems to be doing little more than combining the work of two better films. By the end, it actually wrestles with something in a unique way, and almost has a great finish.

First, it’s tribute to other films. In the opening sequences, we are introduced to Wesley Gibson (played by the consistently impressive James McAvoy). Wesley is a mid-level accountant in a faceless corporation. He hates his boss, an oppressive petty woman, and hates his job. He hates his girlfriend, who is sleeping with his best friend (he hates him too). In all, this life that he hates has left him a muted man, going through the motions knowing that the next day promises nothing better than what today has given. His life has become a celebration of banality.

This is ground that Fight Club explored better than about any film, and in these moments I was struck by how little the reflection on these issues has really changed in ten years. The sense that modern life is an emasculating force in our lives is still very present, and this observation seems as timely now as Fight Club did then.

But Wanted doesn’t stop there, and moves from Fight Club to The Matrix. The film’s opening moments (at times directly quoting The Matrix), get explained as we learn that Wesley’s father, who abandoned him when he was young, is part of a secret society of assassins, who have operated for over 1000 years. His father, and Wesley, have a gift in the form of an ability that few possess, an ability that enables them to be skilled assassins. This organization calls Wesley to take his father’s place, to train so that he can accept his first mission: hunt down his father’s killer.

This hero’s call, laced with a framework from Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, will look familiar to viewers of The Matrix, Star Wars, and other fantasy narratives. There’s very little new here, except for some cool special effects and fun action. For a large portion of the film, it doesn’t appear as if Wanted is going to do anything more either. And that wouldn’t be that bad. After all, they were fun movies, and if we don’t get much more out of a summer action flick than a reminder of better films, I doubt many will complain.

But the film suddenly becomes much more interesting as the group reveals how they choose their targets. The organization discovered in the early years a secret contained in the weaving of fabric, that small blemishes could be read and interpreted to name the targets for assassination. Thus, they live to serve “Fate,” which uses them to reorder reality around its mysterious purposes.

As Wesley learns his skills and carries out his assassinations, he slowly learns to embrace his place, though not without some skepticism. How do you assassinate someone who hasn’t done anything yet, only because Fate has determined that they will do greater harm in the future? This doubt reaches its pinnacle when, after a number of critical plot points I won’t reveal here, Wesley and other members are faced with a difficult choice. Do they follow their orders and trust Fate, or do they trust in their own choice as better than the mysteries of fate?

Fate vs. free will. Now we’re talking! Of course, discussions around fatalism and free will are nothing new to film. But what is interesting for Wanted is that the choice they seem to make is that trusting to Fate is a better, even a more freeing choice than exercising an unrestricted free will. While the question they pose is nothing new to film, the answer they arrive at is somewhat novel.

Having said that, it’s worth noting how different their dichotomy of fatalism and free will is from robust Christian theology. As much as large swaths of the Christian world today embrace the language of free will as indisputable theology, I don’t think most of them mean what they mean in a film like this, nor should a notion of Fate as seen here be familiar to Christians who live in a theistic universe. Their understanding of Fate is locked in mystery, whose purposes are always kept fully secret, and who gives nothing but orders for followers to obey. Such is not the God of the Bible. His otherness means mystery abounds, but His revelation speaks to a moral order to the universe, who calls people into action but drives home again and again the motivation for doing so. We trust not to an impersonal Fate, but to a personal Father.

Similarly, regardless of debates and diversity within Christian tradition, popular notions of free will should prove unfamiliar to us. After all, we don’t live an unbound existence, but instead spend our lives in tension between two types of bonded existence: bonded to sin, or bonded to Christ. One of the key BIblical revelations is that a life bonded to Christ is the true life of freedom.


As I said, the film winds up touching on profoundly interesting ideas, and almost makes a good point. But in the end, the need to be cool wins out, and what we’re left with is a kind of “theology light.” Still, Wanted offers a pretty interesting journey with a unique detour that certainly offers a unique point of view for popular film, and that alone makes it worth the journey.