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''This is the role Angelina Jolie 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.
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.
- Ancient Conspiracy: They're not ancient, but otherwise the Fraternity fits this trope to a T.
- The Bad Guy Wins: It already happened. Why do you think it's such a Crapsack World?
- 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."
- Captain Ersatz: As noted above, many characters are based on characters from DC and Marvel comics.
- Classy Cat Burglar: The Fox subverts it. She seems like one at first glance, but stick around and you'll find her to be crass, vulgar, and ultraviolent.
- 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.
- Conqueror From The Future: The Future. With Nazism.
- Contemporary Caveman: Adam-One, who took The Slow Path to get there.
- 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!"
- Depraved Bisexual: The original Killer occasionally engages in homosexual acts once in a while when he gets bored with women.
- 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.
- Evil Versus Evil: The protagonists are supervillains who rule the world in secret and abuse their authority on a regular basis. The antagonists are supervillains who are sick of the "in secret" part. Anyone who might have advocated for a third option was killed or brainwashed decades ago.
- From Nobody To Nightmare: Wesley is a particularly horrifying example.
- Genocide Backfire: Mr. Rictus, bored silly after decades without a decent opponent, attempts to deliberately invoke this trope by slaughtering a young boy's entire family in front of him, in the hopes that he will eventually come looking for revenge.
- Get Out Of Jail Free Card: All members of the Fraternity are issued a pin bearing the group's logo. Displaying this pin to a law enforcement agent allows the bearer to get away with anything. Really.
- 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.
- Hollywood Atheist: Mr. Rictus, who turned evil because he found out there was no afterlife, and decided to just do whatever the hell he wanted for the rest of his life. And it turns out he wants to do some evil, evil sh*t.
- I'm A Humanitarian: Mr. Rictus is seen eating someone.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: The Killer's trademark superpower, which Wesley inherits through Superpowerful Genetics. How improbable? It is confirmed that Wesley has inherited the power when he shoots six flies out of the air with one shot. Later, he remembers walking through a police station and shooting every officer he encountered squarely between the eyes...even when he wasn't looking.
- Lead The Target
- Legion Of Doom: The Fraternity.
- Mad Scientist: Professor Solomon Seltzer.
- 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.
- The Multiverse: The Fraternity often raids other universes 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: 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.
- Shiny New Australia: One of Mr. Rictus' grievances is that, when the villains divvied up the continents, he got stuck with Australia.
- 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.
- The Syndicate: All organized crime is run by the Fraternity.
- 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.
- Written By The Winners: Literally. After they killed or brainwashed all the heroes, the Fraternity used their magic and mad science to rewrite history, making everyone believe they were never real to begin with.
- Xanatos Gambit: Everything is masterminded by Wesley's father since he's hated how his mother raised him to be a "pussy" while The Killer still wanted to be a supervillain, so he made Wesley "man up" in his mind to take his place since age is catching up to him.
- Xanatos Sucker. And how...
- Yellow Peril: The Emperor.
- 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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