Wanted
Star rating: ****
Dir: Timur Bekmambetov
With: Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman

A terrifying sight opens Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's retina-searing action thriller. Never fear: it's not another glimpse of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin playing action man. It's a Glaswegian (David O'Hara) leaping from one skyscraper to another. He's armed, he's hugely dangerous, and he's not a happy bunny. It's a scene other directors would feel blessed to have in a closing segment, but here it's a mere sample of what's on the way. When you have talent to burn like Bekmambetov, why not start as you mean to go on - at warp speed.

If you caught Bekmambetov's modern vampire yarns Night Watch and Day Watch, you'll know he's a gifted special effects merchant. Apply his singular vision to a story by Scotland's comic book-writing, international superhero Mark Millar, and add one James McAvoy, an actor currently so cool he has sweaty polar bears as groupies, and the result is a seriously exciting movie. It has moments when the SFX become migraine inducing, but the moviegoer hasn't had this many bangs for their buck since the last Bourne.

O'Hara soon makes way for the real hero, McAvoy's Wesley Gibson. In keeping with the comic book tradition that says the geek shall inherit the earth, Wesley is an out and out loser. Stuck in a dead-end job as a cubicle meerkat, he's prone to panic attacks and his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend. Eliminating any doubt that he's a prize sap, the wardrobe department have put him in an anorak.

Life sucks for Wesley, until he meets Angelina Jolie in the supermarket. That sort of thing must happen all the time in Hollywood, but these are the dark realms of comic-book land. Something's afoot, something involving very big guns and bullets that can go round corners. In the blink of an X-ray eye, McAvoy is in the middle of a car chase that chucks every law of physics out the window. Fox (Jolie) is at the wheel, splayed across the bonnet, steering the car with her thighs, and all the while blasting away at their pursuer.

As it turns out, Wesley, now a wanted man after the car chase business, is a very special individual. He learns this after Fox takes him to the lair of a group led by Morgan Freeman. The Shawshank Redemption star, doing his usual God crossed with Grandpa Walton turn, invites Wesley to join The Fraternity, a secret society of assassins founded 1000 years ago by weavers. That's right, weavers. Not spies, princes, outlaws or seventh sons of seventh sons, but weavers.

This idea of cloth manufacturers as executioners prompts some of the film's more amusing moments. Wesley, unable to believe that the mill and the spinning machines aren't just an elaborate front, airs his doubts. "Either you make sweaters or you kill people," he challenges Morgan in a line so bonkers it approaches brilliance (a bit like Bekmambetov). Then there's the way the assassins are given their orders to kill. These arrive via the Loom of Fate, which presumably succeeded the Workbench of Destiny and the Cutting Table of Chance as a method of communication.

Though still wary, Wesley swallows the highly suspect credo of the assassins - "kill one and maybe save a thousand" - and gets to work. Bekmambetov does the same. In Day Watch and Night Watch, the Kazakhstan-born director had to make the most of a Russian-level budget. Now he's in Hollywood, the piggy bank is silo size and he must have spent every last dime in it. From bullets meeting in mid-air to cars doing slo-mo cartwheels, Bekmambetov hurls everything at the screen.

While initially thrilling, a special effects fatigue starts to kick in after an hour. The senses, battered from the off with the flying Glaswegian, go into semi-shutdown as the action goes well over the top. The quieter moments, when McAvoy gets the chance to do some of that acting lark, are to be treasured. It's not easy sharing screen space with the vision of gorgeousness that is Jolie, but the star of Atonement and The Last King of Scotland earns his place in this picture, and then some. If there's another actor who can go from geek to action god so convincingly let him come forward. There's a nice spark between Jolie and McAvoy, more brother-sister than anything else, as if she's sizing him up for entry into the family of movie A-listers and likes what she sees.

Wanted's designer violence, carnage by Lacroix, won't be to everyone's liking, and you probably will need to lie down in a darkened room for a while after viewing. But those in the mood for some thrilling, wildly inventive, head-banging moviemaking with a leading man coming into his own, should put seeing Bekmambetov's picture on their list of desires.