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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 getting the shit kicked out of him by the rest of the team.
Wes learns many plot-relevant skills, including the pretty sweet ability to bend bullets. No, they don't really explain how, and no, they don't really need to. He uses these abilities to take down several nefarious do-badders, until it's finally time to confront Cross. Cue the giant showdown on a moving train...and on a crashing train...and on a falling train. But hey, at least Wesley finally gets his man — or does he?
Of course he doesn't. He just runs headlong into The Reveal, which sets up the real finale. A sequel for the movie is currently in the works.
Originally a Mark Millar comic-book miniseries with little to nothing in common with the recent movie, the movie of Wanted is the poster child for Tropes Are Not Bad. It uses some very classic — some might say old or overused — tropes, and it plays them unflinchingly straight, but they work (mostly) very well.
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 Plot Point 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, opinions vary on the success.
Not to be confused with the UK Game Show of the same name
The Wanted movie and game provides examples of the following tropes:
Meanwhile, the mini-series contains:
- Alternate Company Equivalent: Nearly all of the main characters are thinly-disguised versions of popular DC (mostly) or Marvel super-villains. For that matter, so are most of the heroes dispatched when the Fraternity took over. The event in which the villains erase the heroes also takes place in the same year that Crisis On Infinite Earths was published.
- Breaking The Fourth Wall: The whole comic is basically Gibson giving you the middle finger. "This is my face when I'm fucking you in the ass."
- Classy Cat Burglar: The Fox.
- Comic Book Fantasy Casting: Wesley and the Fox are drawn to look identical to Eminem and Halle Berry. Didn't work out...
- Complete Monster: Mr. Rictus. Wesley goes this way but does go through a Villainous Breakdown.
- Crapsack World: the world is that way because the villains altered reality when they won, turning the Earth from a bright, hopeful place, to a dreary one that's, well, pretty much ours.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: "LEE HARVEY OSWALD!"
- Dodge The Bullet: Despite having a vast array of firearms used against him, Wesley never actually ends up getting shot, most likely due to this trope. His father is explicitly shown dodging bullets, and since Wesley got his powers from his dad, it makes sense that he would be capable of the same feat.
- Freudian Excuse: Rictus does a bunch of nasty shit, simply because he found out there was no heaven.
- The Hedonist. Nearly everyone. Which is bad for the universe at large since the thing that makes supervillains feel good is petty evil on a good day and vicious genocide on a bad one.
- The Masquerade. Ostensibly this is to keep superheroes from across the multiverse from coming to this universe and saving the world. It has the added effect of making everyone completely ignorant of how things actually work.
- Parallel Dimensions - The Fraternity often raids these for trivial things.
- Refuge In Audacity: This is the only reason you don't put the book down within reading the first 15 or so pages.
- Roaring Rampage Of Revenge: Wesley narrates a very detailed montage of him killing every single person in his life that gave him grief.
- Rule Of Cool: Even more so. They fly a jet through the portal back to their dimension in the second book. The portal inside of an office building. And all of this is part of a heist to steal a radioactive condom.
- Oh, and people getting eaten by a giant octopus, or Eminem gone Grammaton with a massive minigun blasting a shack of supervillains.
- Squick: Well, since This Troper doesn't find anything wrong with human bodies exploding from Wesley's shots and cannibalism.
- "I do not fuck goats Mr. Gibson. I make love to them."
- Take That: Gibson. Again. At you. Because, well, You Suck, You Bastard.
- Training Montage: Gibson's character in the comic gets used to the training (which uses innocent civilians as targets, eventually) with glee.
- Villain Protagonist: Westley, who upon going evil shaves his head into an Eminem-style crewcut and freely commits murders and rapes just because he could. Not to mention being a misanthropist...
- It's very, very hard, that, if you placed him and the Big Bad in a locker and gave them the same voice, you could not tell the difference.
- You Bastard: Your vicarious enjoyment of rape and murder is despicable.
- You Suck: As mentioned - Gibson. The final few pages of the series really hammer this point home. The theme of the comic is literally that nothing matters, comic books suck, you suck for reading comic books, and Mark Millar really, really hates his job and life and wishes he could do anything besides write comic books.
- Your Mileage May Vary: Fun deconstruction of the supervillain or morally despicable nihilistic adolescent power fantasy that endorses rape? You decide.
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