The money shot in “Wanted,” its pièce-de-special-effects-résistance and reason for green-lighted being, appears in the opening minutes of this noisy, ultraviolent shoot-’em-up with Angelina Jolie, her many tattoos and some guys. A man has soared onto the roof of a high-rise where he has laid a handful of others to waste. Suddenly the camera cuts to his face as a bullet exits his forehead in slow motion, his skin stretching forward as the projectile tears through it, going straight for the camera and our already numbed skulls.
Well, that’s one way to get the attention of fickle moviegoers, particularly if, like the director Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve got nothing else going for your big Hollywood debut except Ms. Jolie and a couple of ideas recycled from “The Matrix” and “Fight Club.” Mind you, Ms. Jolie has been perfectly cast as a super-scary, seemingly amoral assassin named (wait for it) Fox. Few American actresses, especially those with such pin-skinny arms, can make beating a guy to the ground look so easy and, yeah, man, like fun. With her mean smiley-sneer and snug clothes, her heels and hieroglyphics, she cuts the kind of disciplinarian figure who can bring antsy boys of all ages to their knees or at least into their theater seats.
Beating down the audience is what the crudest entertainments try to do, and in this respect, and in every other, “Wanted” is nothing new. And Mr. Bekmambetov, a Russian filmmaker who has earned a cult following with his razzly-dazzly thrillers “Day Watch” and “Night Watch,” certainly proves here that he knows how to use every blunt tool of the bullying trade: flashy effects, zippy cuts, simulated death, walls of sound, wheels of steel and, in between the bullets and blood, a hot mama to make the brother-to-brother, man-on-man action less worrisome. This is, after all, a movie almost entirely organized around the sights and sounds of men piercing one another’s bodies, which makes for a whole lot of twitching and spurting.
“Wanted” is a goof, then, and for a short stretch a pretty diverting one. The basic story, culled from a comic-book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones, revolves around a pusillanimous cubicle drone named Wesley (James McAvoy, going for cheeky and packing new muscle), who, at least in the movie, has been conceptualized along the same Everyman lines as Edward Norton’s character in “Fight Club.” Both have soul-sucking jobs, self-mocking voiceovers and a glamorous comrade in violence who ushers them into thrilling worlds of excitement and life-altering action, except that Mr. Norton’s friend is played by Brad Pitt, and Mr. McAvoy’s friend is played by Mr. Pitt’s real partner, Ms. Jolie, which, for about a millisecond makes this sound far more interesting than what actually materializes on screen.
What does turn up looks familiar — the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity — especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Mr. Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room — a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage — in a layout in Vogue.
The problem is that after a grindingly repetitive rotation of bang-bang, boom-boom, knuckle sandwiches and exploding heads, I wanted to sink into one of those tubs myself (minus the rats scuttling nearby). There’s no denying Mr. Bekmambetov’s energy or enthusiasm: he blows people and stuff up with gusto. But all his visual ideas, or at least the memorable ones, are borrowed, as are the pitifully few thoughts in the script by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan. Even if the ideas in “The Matrix” didn’t blow your mind or stir memories of college-age woolgathering, at least it has ideas and real feeling. There’s something at stake in its world, which is why its fusion of skepticism and sincerity worked so well, and still does.
Things happen in “Wanted,” but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference. Fox and the rest of the Fraternity — headed by Morgan Freeman, voice and eyes glazed with boredom — initiate Wesley into their killing ways. He, in turn, discovers their dusty secrets (blah-blah, monks and weaving), eyeballs the other guys (Common and Thomas Kretschmann, both wasted) and learns how to make a bullet curve through the air, a trick that soon loses its wow factor. Mr. Bekmambetov jerks the strings, setting his puppets to dancing. Right on cue Mr. McAvoy swaggers and Ms. Jolie smiles even as Mr. Freeman checks his watch, beating me to the punch.
“Wanted” is rated R. (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.) Nonstop violence, brief kitchen-counter sex.
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