‘Wanted’: First peek

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Has any modern starlet had a stranger career than Angelina Jolie? She’s such a bigger-than-life presence on screen that it’s become apparent that--outside of Brad Pitt, who was a great foil for her in ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’--that there really isn’t a male actor who can go toe-to-toe with her for 90 minutes. Even Matt Damon, who’s certainly a strong masculine presence, was completely knocked off course by Jolie in ‘The Good Shepherd.’ After seeing her dominate him in scene after scene, it was hard to believe Damon as an all-controlling spymaster for two seconds flat.

James McAvoy, the erstwhile star of ‘Wanted,’ Universal’s new action-adventure film (due June 27), doesn’t fare much better. I went to see an early screening Sunday night and, having seen a slew of trailers dominated by Jolie’s hot hitwoman character, was surprised to discover that McAvoy is the real star of the film, with Jolie relegated to a supporting role. If only it were the other way around. But Hollywood prefers its summer action movies with male heroes, so Jolie is cast as McAvoy’s mentor, teaching him how to use his good genes (his father was a master assassin) to become a worthy foe to a vicious assassin who’s bumping off other members of the club, much to the chagrin of Morgan Freeman, who plays God again, this time as the zen-master leader of the film’s fraternity of assassins.

But I know what you’re really thinking: How is the movie?

Let’s just say that I’ll be surprised if the reviews are anything more than lukewarm. The good news is that ‘Wanted’ gives us a chance to see Timur Bekmambetor, the gifted young Russian director who did 2004’s ‘Night Watch,’ stage a string of lunatic car chase sequences and play with all sorts of high-tech Hollywood effects. The bad news is that the movie was written by a trio of screenwriters who all worked on various ‘Fast and Furious’’ installments at the studio, so the high point of the film is the oh-so-many car chases, not character development or coherence of storytelling. (I look forward to reading the reviews just to see the critics try to describe the film’s many preposterous plot twists, especially how the master assassins got into the weaving business.)

Hollywood has a horrible habit of hiring talented foreign film directors and giving them terrible scripts to make, a recent example being Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose riveting film ‘Downfall’ won a best foreign-language film Oscar. He got stuck making ‘The Invasion,’ a dreadful Warners sci-fi remake that ended up being rewritten and in part reshot by the Wachowskis. Bekmambetor has similar issues here. This feels like a one-quadrant movie, the one quadrant being young guys who love to see stunts, Jolie’s tattooed bare back and don’t mind a lot of gooey gore and mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the assassin’s code.

If I got it right, the code is: Kill one, maybe save a thousand. Someone will have to ask Bekmambetor, but I have a feeling that sounds a lot better in Russian than it does in English.