Wanted: A Four-Sentence Movie Review

Sometimes, I feel like I'm a pretty simple man who doesn't ask for much from this life, and giving me a movie with Angelina Jolie firing a lot of big guns, beating the crap out of anyone who gets in her way, and somehow managing to be haltingly seductive while doing it (I don't think she has to try too hard with that) fulfills many of those simple needs.

Beginning with the part where Jolie walks up to James McAvoy's hen-pecked, walked-over, beaten-down, miserable office drone of a character and tells him to come with her (raise your hand if you wouldn't do that), Wanted is almost two hours of total male fantasy that amazingly doesn't include pornography - unless you consider sensationalized, computer-generated depictions of elegantly crafted bullets spearing through foreheads while trailing blood and brain matter behind them kind of sexy (and we don't like to judge here).

Watching this movie, with its balletically staged action sequences and physics-defying violence (yet still with nothing as ridiculous as the car launching into the helicopter in Live Free or Die Hard) kind of gives you the same feeling after eating a tub of popcorn at the theater, when what your body really needed was an actual meal with protein and vegetables instead of carbohydrates soaked in something resembling butter.

Of course, that popcorn also tastes really good, especially when you're in the mood for something salty, and outside of the Wachowski brothers, I'm not sure anyone creates reality-bending special effects and action like Timur Bekmambetov (check out Night Watch and Day Watch if you're in the mood for some fun sci-fi/fantasy stuff), but after you've shoveled it all down your gullet, do you really feel that good about yourself?