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Being a fan of Night Watch (not to be confused with this terrible movie) and Day Watch, once I found out that director Timur Bekmambetov was in charge of Wanted, I was sold. And, perhaps, Scotsman James McAvoy had a teeny bit to do with my wanting to see the movie.

I barely knew anything about Wanted when I walked into the theater, except that it's about a guy who is suddenly thrust from a boring life into a world of professional assassins. And, that basically is the premise. Wesley works in a cubicle and is living the Office Space life with a witch of a boss. He has a girlfriend, who cheats on him with his work buddy, and he has almost no money. One day at the store, a beautiful woman approaches him to let him know his father, an assassin, was just killed, and that the man who killed his father is now after him. The man in question arrives and a shootout and car chase ensues, and soon Wesley is told that he has inherited everything from his father and can join the assassination crew, who (get this) receive the lists of whom they are to kill by reading flaws--which translate to binary-- in a fabric that is pieced together by a giant loom. No joke.

When the movie first started, it felt a little bit hokey. The first big scene where the audience was exposed to the special assassin tactics (they are actually born with the ability to sort of experience the world in slow motion by adapting the speed of their own bodies) made the audience laugh. There's a lot of time spent in exposition at Wesley's work, which seemed like it could be edited down a bit. And McAvoy's American accent sounds a little bit odd as well.

But, when the story gets moving, all the hokey feels like a friendly hokeyness, like you might experience while watching a humorous Asian action film. It's kind of like Fight Club meets Kung Fu Hustle.. or maybe Rumble in the Bronx would be a better comparison.

Anyway, the idea of weavers (Josh, when the movie started, I thought they were using "weavers" in the Robert Jordan sense, but they were actually talking about guys who weave fabric!) and the loom of fate, as I like to call it, are ridiculous. But the movie has a fun sense of humor and some great action sequences. One certainly laughs at some of the ridiculousness, but once I saw a certain sequence with rats in it, I was sure that the filmmakers wanted (hey, that's the name of the movie!) us to laugh.

By the end, we all walked out thoroughly entertained, even despite the fact that the movie's big secret was revealed while the sound went out in our theater. If I were you, I'd probably wait to see it at the cheap theater, but obviously, only for those of you who like weird, funny, sometimes tasteless, and sometimes bloody action flicks.