My wife’s an Angelina Jolie fan, so we rented Wanted — and, oy, big mistake. We watched maybe 30 minutes and that was all we could stand. You can really tell it’s from a comic-book — it has the white, male, nerdy angst thing down cold. Except, where the point with Spider-Man was always that Peter was at least somewhat likeable, the hero here is just whiny and despicable and boring. The by-the-numbers transformation into incredible assassin who bends bullets is thunderingly dumb, and the whole super-hip visuals and urban coolness thing is more or less utterly undermined by the fact that the whole schtick has been stolen wholesale from the Matrix.

This is definitely one of those movies, too, where the wish-fulfillment is all about some nerdy schmo getting with (or in this case, just being somewhat near) incredibly hot babe. They can’t even seem to get that right, though; at least in the first quarter, Jolie’s hardly on screen, and by the time you’ve watched that, you don’t want to watch anymore. I guess I just don’t quite understand why you’d have Angelina Jolie in the movie, and then spend most of your time following this relentlessly boring, whiny guy. You’ve got someone on screen with actual charisma, for god’s sake. Couldn’t we just watch her? Why not have her be the depressed nobody who turns into the amazing assassin? Surely that (or anything really) would have been better than this.