Wanted (2008)

“One thousand years ago, a sentient piece of linen decided to use binary code to tell a group of fanatical hooded weirdos who like to knit who they should murder. Now it’s ‘now’ and in America and bullets are magic and people don’t follow the laws of physics.”

I have to assume the pitch to the studio exec didn’t include any of the above plot points of the actual movie, otherwise there’s no way this would have gotten made.

Set somewhere in Chicago, Wesley (James McAvoy) is a loser with a dead-end job and a failed relationship. He meets Fox (Angelina Jolie) who takes him to meet Sloan (Morgan Freeman), so he can learn to kill people good. Like, super good.

It starts with an opening monologue painfully similar to Jack’s (Edward Norton) opening diatribe in “Fight Club” (1999), except Norton did it a decade before and a magnitude better.
Unlike Jack, Wesley doesn’t come across as a downtrodden everyman who’s simply been beaten up by life - he’s a whiny, simpering child in an adult body who’s failures are his own, caused by himself, without any kind of behavior that would make the audience sympathetic to him.
And he has anxiety attacks, which the movie unfortunately portrays as a form of personal weakness instead of as a medical condition like they actually are.

Wesley’s dad left when he was seven days old - a fact that Wesley brings up repeatedly, and with much disdain, whenever anyone brings up his father.
Right up until he finds out that his dad was the greatest assassin of this generation, at which point Wesley suddenly thinks his dear dead dad is the greatest thing since sliced bread and wants nothing more in life than to live up to dad’s reputation.

As to why Wesley was picked to join the club of needle-point nutjobs: he has a special ability. He can consciously raise his heart rate to 400 BPM to flood his body with adrenaline so that he can make bullets curve through the air by flailing his gun around like a spastic kid who’s been given too much sugar and a lit sparkler.

But before Wesley learns he can prevent his heart from exploding in his chest, we’re treated to an aggressively average car chase where Wesley screams the entire time.
Screaming scenes are unacceptable when its little kids doing it; it’s even worse when it’s an adult. It’s not okay from anyone and I don’t know why any producer has ever wanted to have that in their movie.

The inexplicably prescient fabric wasn’t a joke: for some reason, there is a loom that appears to function on perpetual energy that will purposefully mis-sew threads to give up the secrets of the universe. But it only lists the names of the people who should be killed; not where they are, or why, what country they’re in, or any other useful tidbits. As this movie takes place almost entirely in Chicago (with a brief stint to a monastery in Prague or some such), it’s hard to believe that the list of ‘people to kill’ includes anyone outside this one particular city in Illinois.
It’s entirely unexplained how the original group of wacko weavers discovered this bizarre phenomenon, or how they would have known to interpret the mis-stitches as binary code, or what binary code is, but once they realized that names were being listed they made the obvious choice: kill everyone who’s name appears.
Flawless.

These assassins aren’t tied to anyone’s government, and at some point in history decided to move from “vague European locale” to “Chicago” for nothing more than kicks, and possibly because they knew the L-train would eventually get built and that there would be some incredibly stupid “training” scenes on top of it.

There were two completely separate items/events that both fit the bill for Chekov’s Gun, but neither one panned out, so that was pretty weird.

The society of gun-wielding assassins included one dude who was really into knives. None of the assassinations shown ever required knives, so his existence wasn’t justified, though that did make for an entertaining ‘you brought a knife to a gun fight’ scene near the end. 
Surprise, he died.

There were magic bullets. They weren’t explained, or talked about, or given any amount of valuable explanation, considering how important they were to these modern assassins’ ‘ignore trajectory’ gunfights.
But they did appear to have weird engravings on them, so… cool?

Apparently, one of the assassins’ favorite ways to recuperate after a hit is to submerge themselves in an ice bath. Weird, but not unfathomable - as Megan pointed out, real athletes do that too.
What was bonkers was that the ice formed impossible, translucent layers over the bathing individuals’ faces, which made them look like they’d just finished a particularly aggressive Krispy Kreme-funded PornHub shoot.

The special effects were mediocre. There was lots of blood but surprisingly few explosions, and we saw an unfortunate amount of Wesley doing things the human body simply can’t do, both for healing purposes and because physics says so.

The soundtrack was absolutely terrible. Most of it was awful punk rock that would have been more at home in something I wasn’t watching, and the “orchestral” bits that accompanied Wesley’s successes sounded like a deaf man’s take on uplifting success music.

Unfortunately, this movie was another case of Morgan Freeman taking roles that required him to say things that were pretty exclusively anti-science. I have to wonder if he actively seeks those parts, or if he just assumes that his buttery-smooth voice will somehow get you to ignore just how stupid his pieces of the script are.

The idea of a secret group of assassins living right under our noses isn’t a failure of a  concept, as the entire “John Wick” franchise has shown us. Unfortunately, this flick just did it poorly, in a way that didn’t make a lick of sense.

The end scene was Wesley being unreasonably successful, considering that he spent most of the film being about as endearing as a half-eaten goat dragging itself through your living room, with a line that made it clear they were hoping for a sequel, what with this being based on a comic book series and all.
For the sake of the studio’s bottom line, I can only hope they have the foresight not to waste any amount of resources on such an endeavor.

I watched “Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus” before this, and thought “Nah, that’s too stupid to review; I need to review a real movie.”
This was definitely the worse of the two.