History Main / WANTED

* PlayingGertrude: [[spoiler: Thomas Kretschmann, as Cross, is only 16 years older than James McAvoy, making this a borderline example.]]

* GunsDoNotWorkThatWay: Cross pulls his pistol's trigger so fast, his two bullets hit Fox's car tire near-simultaneously. In reality, even if you squeeze the trigger fast enough, the gun cannot operate nearly fast enough to chamber the next round for that feat to be possible. With a revolver, maybe , but not with a pistol. The game is even more eregious about this.

* BusFullOfInnocents: Brutally subverted. [[spoiler:The hero's actions cause an ENTIRE TRAIN OF INNOCENTS to fall to their doom, which he promptly ignored to go on with his personal battle with Cross.]] This is sort of weird, seeing as how he deliberately curved a bullet to avoid killing an innocent woman earlier. [[spoiler:Not that it mattered, as she and whatever family members she brought on the train with her, are dead.]]

* DownInFront: Hi Teague.

** Also, if you do a search the name "Wesley Gibson" the only pages that show are those related to the movie or appeared after it's release.

* BusFullOfInnocents: Brutally averted. [[spoiler:The hero's actions cause an ENTIRE TRAIN OF INNOCENTS to fall to their doom, which he promptly ignored to go on with his personal battle with Cross.]] This is sort of weird, seeing as how he deliberately curved a bullet to avoid killing an innocent woman earlier. [[spoiler:Not that it mattered, as she and whatever family members she brought on the train with her, are dead.]]

** Answer: The Mythbusters explaining why that is bizarre and impossible. But it certainly says enough.

* TropesExaminedByMythbusters: sorry, spinning bullets is what bullets already usually do in decent guns, and that's to help them keep going forward, and on the correct trajectory. Keeping it from spinning causes the bullet to go in some random straight direction, but it probably won't hit whatever it hits with the nose of the bullet.
** Also, see Newton's First Law. The only way to make a spinning bullet is probably to motorize it somehow.

Meet Wesley Gibson. Wesley's father abandoned him when he was a week old, and things have gone steadily downhill since. He works for a disgusting boss at a job he hates before going home to a girlfriend who's sleeping with his best friend. But suddenly, Wesley is tapped to join The Fraternity, a league of elite international assassins. He is trained specifically to kill Cross, the rogue Fraternity member who killed his father, mostly by [[TrainingFromHell getting the shit kicked out of him]] by the rest of the team.

* TeethFlying: When the main character snaps, quits his job and smacks his backstabbing "best friend" on the way out with his keyboard, we're treated to a Bullet Time shot of a tooth flying out, forming the letter U to accompany the F, C and K keys that flew off the keyboard.

** Solomon and the Emperor reminisce about using a radioactive condom against the Wantedverse's version of Superman, a reference to ''{{Mallrats}}''.

** Solomon and the Emperor reminisce about using a radioactive condom against the Wantedverse's version of Superman, a reference to ''{{Mallrats}''.

[[caption-width-right:350:Count the tropes in this poster. I dare you.]]

->''This is the role AngelinaJolie was born to play. She emerged from the womb already covered in tattoos and eyeliner for the express purpose of playing this character, who immediately entered my pantheon of Chicks I Want to Be Like When I Grow Up. Fox is the reason Angelina Jolie was put on this earth.
->--'''Cleolinda Jones, [[http://community.livejournal.com/m15m/18784.html Wanted in 15 Minutes]]''' ''

There is a game, ''Weapons of Fate,'' that draws plot elements from both the comic book and the film (most notably, Wesley in his original costume and the Russian assassin that serves as a PlotPoint in the movie). The game starts shortly after the movie ends, and is notable both for being a sequel instead of a recreation, and for taking a year after the movie's release for development with the explicit goal of ''not'' falling into the "rushed product to match the movie's release date and hype" trap. Naturally, [[YourMileageMayVary opinions vary]] on the success.

Not to be confused with the UK GameShow [[WantedUKGameShow of the same name]]

* BeyondTheImpossible: [[TrickBullet MULTI-STAGE BULLETS]]. Enough said.
** Curving the bullets. And practically everything.

* ChekhovsGun: [[spoiler:The exploding rats]].
** Which are probably a ShoutOut to NinjaScroll, considering the same trick is used to down a villain in that movie.
** Another more literal ChekhovsGun: [[spoiler:The sniper rifle from the beginning of the movie.]]
** Also the El train.

<<|{{Film}}|>>

* RuleOfCool: Pretty much the whole freaking thing. Seriously, if you watch it for the plot, [[ExcusePlot you're doing it wrong]].

* ActionGirl: Fox.

** Or straight up FanDisservice depending on your preferences. Jolie at this point was skinny to the point of resembling anorexia. This troper would have been much more comfortable to see her keep her clothes on.

* HeyItsThatGuy: KonstantinKhabensky has gone from [[NightWatch chasing down vampires]] to being the Exterminator.
** And [[DoctorWho Elton]] is the Repairman!

* AdaptationDecay: The movie makes virtually the entire opposite point to the book. [[YourMileageMayVary Depending on preference]], you might like this or hate this. Interestingly, [[WordOfGod the book's writer]] likes it, as he agreed with the filmmakers that the book would be impossible to turn into a straight film adaptation without significant changes to begin with, ultimately helping to conceptualize the movie's alternate plot.
** Depending on your outlook, the film might even be better in many respects; the comic turns a shlub into a genuinely, horrifyingly, monstrous VillainProtagonist and pretty much [[ShootTheShaggyDog Shoots the Shaggy Dog]] doing it. The film turns pretty much the same schlub into a very, very different AntiHero and can be seen as a rather more satisfying character arc.

* CrowningMomentOfAwesome: Wesley in his office after meeting the Fraternity. Epic-level verbal pwnage followed by keyboard bitchslap equals win.
** Made more awesome upon seeing, in slow motion, the bloodied keys spelling out "FUCK YO", and the guy's ''broken tooth'' forming the final U.
** And ''again'' in the ending. "[[spoiler:This is just a motherfucking decoy.]]"
** Most cutscenes in ''Weapons of Fate,'' right to the end when [[spoiler: Wesley defeats the Immortal,]] ''especially'' in the PC version.
** Fox's [[spoiler:HeroicSacrifice]] is one of the coolest moments in the film. The intensity, the sheer unbelievability of it, and the look on her face... Bad.Ass.
** Wesley's one-man assault on the textile factory?
* CrowningMusicOfAwesome: DannyElfman does the soundtrack, and even [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRWsqZNJa_M sings]]!

* HolyShitQuotient: Probably [[ReadingsAreOffTheScale over nine thousand]].

* MemeticMutation: "Shoot THIS motherfucker!"

* NightmareFuel: A garbage truck chock-freaking-full of the [[spoiler:aforementioned exploding rats]].

* {{Wangst}}: Everything until AngelinaJolie first appears. Fortunately, it's PlayedForLaughs.

* BizarreAndImprobableBallistics: As if the bullet curving is not ridiculous enough, the movie isn't even consistent about how it is done. In all the previous scene, to make the bullet curve from to the right, the character swings their hand to the right, and vice versa. However, on the bullet train, Wesley makes his first bullet aimed at Cross curve to the RIGHT (from his point of view) by swinging his arm to his LEFT (again, from his point of view). Note that only Wesley does this, Cross still swings his arm to the right to shoot at Wesley's bullet.
** And judging by its trajectory, Wesley's bullet would have gone out the window halfway between him and Cross had Cross not decided to hit it with his own bullet.

* VillainsNeverLie: When [[spoiler:Sloan]] tells the Fraternity that [[spoiler:the Loom of Fate chose each of them to die]], they believe him even though [[spoiler:Wesley just told them that Sloan has been manipulating the Loom for his own purposes]].
** Which leads right back to BecauseDestinySaysSo - [[spoiler: rotating the ranks of the Fraternity by killing the other assassins and forcing them to bring in new ones]] might have prevented the entire story from happening in the first place.
** Justified instance: who are you more likely to believe? [[spoiler: The boss who you've got no actual reason to distrust, or the guy who just shot up half your fortress and killed dozens of your friends, after blowing up the other half?]]
** Of course, there is the strong possibility that if they hadn't [[spoiler: followed Sloan's manufactured orders, their name would never have come up on the loom to begin with. It could be that by carrying out Sloan's orders instead of the loom's, they became the problem, and that's why their names came up at all.]]
** Then again, maybe the loom never provided any messages at all. Maybe all the Fraternity's targets throughout history were made up. [[ScrewDestiny NO FATE]].
** That seems to make the most sense, as binary hadn't even existed at the time that Sloan claims the Fraternity started using it.
*** You sir, are absurd.
*** If you mean binary code, yes, ''ours'' didn't exist yet, but they might have had their own code. As for the binary system as a whole, I'm pretty sure it existed. Math exist for a long time.

* BeyondTheImpossible: MULTI-STAGE BULLETS. Enough said.