Wanted

Careens so quickly and adroitly through its breathless and often humorous 110 minutes that most viewers won’t have time to get picky about plot.

Whoa! Wanted sets off the fireworks BIG TIME. This is the heart stopping, extreme summer action movie of your dreams.

Wanted is all about action figures, roller coasters and making bullets do what bullets weren't born to do.

Wanted may be the most absolutely stone bonkers, crazy-good movie of the century. Or it may be a gargantuan piece of trash. Chances are it's a combination of the two. But man, does it rock.

Wanted is a rare action movie that left me wanting more: a second viewing, a sequel, or just to check out the comic books.

All the slow-motion, stop-action trickery going on here recalls another wow-inducing movie -- The Matrix.

It's a massively entertaining, exceedingly violent, testosterone time bomb brimming with spectacular stunts, fabulous effects and ridiculous fights, all framed by a preposterous premise.

So much of Wanted will have you laughing and cheering that it's really the perfect summer escapist action flick.

A genuine thrill ride that has the added bonus of being an action movie you don't have to turn your brain off to enjoy. You might have to disable the part that tries to process plausibility, but that's no great loss.

The film pulls you by the scruff of the neck and makes you thankful for it. It releases every ounce of pent-up frustration and rage in your body.

Does the screenplay, adapted loosely from the cult comic book, exist primarily as a lattice for one ecstatic action set-piece after another? Sure -- but for once, that's not a complaint.

The film is breathlessly paced, gratuitously violent and over-the-top in almost every conceivable way.

Wanted's unabashed, over-the-top violence is refreshing. It's also funny, stylish, and totally entertaining.

A lot of this is quite silly on the page, granted, but Bekmambetov revs it up furiously and unleashes one bit of hyperactive, dazzling invention after another.

Wanted is one of the most graphically bloody films of the year, perhaps since the new millennium. It’s also masochistic, creepy, witty and often very funny in its offbeat take on the old assassin-movie plot.

Bloodlust aside, the director has remarkable visual ideas and a fine sense of pacing.

Wanted slams the pedal to the metal and never slows down. Here’s an action picture that’s exhausting in its relentless violence and its ingenuity in inventing new ways to attack, defend, ambush and annihilate.

If you're looking for nonstop over-the-top mayhem, this is it.

With a star-heavy cast, mind-blowing visuals and more blood than a vampire flick, this modern-day fantasy about an ages-old brotherhood of assassins is an over-the-top guilty pleasure.

Wanted is like a 12-armed heavy-metal drummer after a case of Red Bull, flailing and thundering through two hours of impossible action.

This is what an adrenaline-filled action movie should be: a darkly comic vision whose flaws are obscured by the film's unyielding pace.

It's wish fulfillment for those from the workaday world who can abandon their stations for two hours and vicariously live a little before trudging back to face another eight, endless hours on the clock.

If you're looking for memorable dialogue and gripping drama, then you better get in line for another flick. But if it's spellbinding special effects and high-wire acts you crave, Wanted should be at the top of your list for big budget thrill rides.

Wanted is what I'd call a guilty pleasure. Translation: It's trash, but I love it anyway. Brutal, sexy, built to thrill and minus a scintilla of redeeming social value.

Bekmambetov goes through images like a dangerously feverish maestro hurrying toward the ultimate crescendo. Yet when Freeman, Jolie, McAvoy and the rest get a chance, there's even some decent acting going on.

For a certain kind of action-movie fan -- usually male, young and put-upon -- it's a dream come true.

Wanted leaves the theater floor slick with blood and broken glass. It's one of the most empty-headed but visually impressive films I've seen in years.

There's no hidden meaning; in fact, there's barely any meaning at all. But the movie could make a star of McAvoy.

Bekmambetov's slugs, fired with furious intent by James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and other members of Wanted's blue-chip cast, look like they came out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Wanted is kind of unintelligible and idiotic. Also kind of nasty and brutish. And also undeniably kind of fun.

Perhaps because it arrives with little hype, Wanted seems like such a welcome surprise. But if Bekmambetov is not already planning a sequel, he is missing a good bet.

You either go with the fantasy and enjoy the impossible acts of kinetic creativity or get stuck in the preposterousness of the premise and the flippant execution.

Though it's unlikely Bekmambetov will become a household name once Wanted explodes on the scene, a wider audience certainly will become more familiar with the director's uniquely kinetic aesthetics.

Bekmambetov shoulders most of the work here, making a movie that, for all its feints at black humor and consumer culture satire, fails or succeeds based on the skill with which he portrays one car somersaulting over another.

Wanted has the kick-ass action sequences and high-wattage cast to be this summer's Matrix, but the comic adaptation's gruesome violence, silly plot and leaden script might keep it from appealing to a wide-enough audience.

Wanted may not be what it wants to be, but it's (just barely) what it needs to be: an unapologetically brutish action-thriller that moves just fast enough to outrun its gaping flaws.

Wanted plays it down the middle, being neither too stupid to entirely discount nor smart enough to take seriously.

Wanted is all about the OTT, the over-the-top.

The movie asks audiences to completely suspend their disbelief, primarily by ignoring any and all notions they have about the physical laws and properties of the world in which we live.

Perhaps I have digital-effects fatigue, but their use in Wanted felt gratuitous and unimaginative, as if a story was developed in their image, rather than the other way around.

Wanted demands a high level of credulity, but in exchange it offers some rewards: improbable car-chases, gritty hand-to-hand combat and the sight of Angelina Jolie poured into her pants and packing a pistol.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

The effects and bloodshed gradually lose their power to provoke, though, and become thuddingly tedious -- and with nothing else going for it beyond mere eye candy, Wanted leaves you wanting.

Next to The Hottie and the Nottie -- and for entirely different reasons -- no movie this year will make you want to shoot someone in the head more than Wanted.

None of this season's action extravaganzas have yet to match this film's icebreaker, but then again, neither does anything else in this adaptation of Mark Millar and J.G. Jones's graphic novel.

Bekmambatov puts a high gloss on the increasing preposterous goings on, but in the end it's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Wanted is silly and far-fetched. And if it didn't back up its ridiculous plot with spellbinding visceral energy, it would have been a dismal failure.

Overblown action flick loosens its grip on your nachos just long enough to be fun nonsense.

You could fairly call Wanted, which is loosely based on a graphic novel of the same name, too long, too dumb and too outlandish.

Wanted hurtles past our eyes and ears too fast to register as much more than a video game.

I used to feel a responsibility to view genre movies like Wanted through the eyes of the intended audience. I'm still willing to meet the adrenaline junkies halfway by acknowledging the craft and audacity of such a flashy film.

Bekmametov may have talent, but the arrested-adolescent "escapism" of this picture emits a pretty bad odor.

The film's high proficiency is at the service of a concept that can most accurately be defined as sadomasochistic. I thought these comic movies were supposed to be fun. The only people likely to devour Wanted are wolverines.

Mixes buckets of gore with bizarre notes of whimsy and unintentional comedy.

There are two ways, equally valid, of looking at Wanted: (1) as a go-for-broke action movie of mixed quality and modest but definite entertainment value, or (2) as a sick, sick movie for a sick, sick public.

The action is heavy-duty, but only really enjoyable if you can put aside the obvious comparisons and accept the tale's dubious mythology -- a feat requiring a Neo-like blankness some action fans will find difficult to achieve.

Cars flip, blood spills, but it's nearly impossible to care when Wanted twists its plot from something serviceable to something vague to something laugh-out-loud stupid.

There are bad movies, and so-bad-it's good movies, but Wanted belongs to a category beyond them all -- a realm of pure blinding badness that would embarrass even Jerry Bruckheimer.

Many of the poor souls who wind up watching this thing will say the most idiotic part of the film involves a train that derails while on a bridge and falls, oh, maybe 17 miles down into a chasm, lightly bruising the passengers.

If Maxim magazine ever decides to branch out into filmmaking, Wanted is just the kind of ear-throttling nonsense it’s bound to produce.