Crazy Is Cool: Attacking a guild of assassins with a trash truck full of peanut-butter-smeared bomb-rats? Shooting a bullet so that it flies along a CIRCULAR WALL and kills everybody standing along it, including the shooter? Sloan's "X marks the spot" death from literally miles away during Wesley's "this is (not) me" lecture"? How long is the sequel going to take?!
Designated Hero: While nowhere near as bad as his comic counterpart, Wesley takes as much responsibility for having a train full of innocent people killed.
The 1999 videogame Shadow Company: Left for Dead also featured a team of assassins working for a loom (in this case, an organization called The Loom, not a literal one).
Six years later, in another movie, James McAvoy gets to play character who accuses someone else for committing assassination because the bullet curved.
Jerkass Woobie: Maybe a little bit too sympathetic for a label, but both Movie!Wesley and Fox could qualify. Their sympathetic portrayal in the movie is the closest to humanizing them.
Cross, specifically because he, as it turns out, was Wesley's father. All he wanted to do was to prevent his son from being influenced by the Fraternity.
Wesley Gibson starts out as a miserable accountant with a terrible life until he's dragged into the violent world of the Fraternity of Assassins and trained to murder rogue agent Cross. Told that Cross killed his assassin father, Wesley is brutally trained into a skilled and deadly killer by their leader Sloan and emotionally manipulated to the Fraternity's agenda by Fox. Later killing Cross in a climactic battle aboard a derailed train, Wesley learns he was his true father and is then betrayed by Sloan and Fox. Learning that Sloan was corrupt, Wesley uses his father's extensive research on the Fraternity to mastermind a devastating one man assault that wipes his enemies out. Unable to prevent Sloan escaping, Wesley hires a decoy to live his life to draw Sloan into a trap and finally kill the madman to avenge his father and solidify his own grand legacy.
Fox is both the only female assassin in the Fraternity and its most skilled member. Utterly devoted to the order's adherence to fate knowing it could have saved her father, Fox lies to and seduces Wesley to convince him to become a remorseless killer and murder his own father. A unrivaled driver, Fox somersaults her car to give Wesley a chance to kill a target and rams it into a moving train to help Wesley defeat Cross. Not caring that her actions killed hundreds, Fox confirms Cross's identity and moves to finish Wesley, but can't stop him from escaping. When ambushing Wesley with her fellow assassins, Fox learns that Sloan has betrayed the order's ideals and hidden that all of them had their names marked for death. With true conviction, she ultimately saves Wesley by curving a bullet to kill all her associates and finally herself.
Cross was once among the Fraternity's most legendary assassins, yet goes rogue when he learns Sloan began faking names marked for death to turn a profit rather than follow fate. While watching over his son Wesley, Cross skillfully murders many of his former peers while planning an assault on their headquarters. Failing to stop his son being deceived, he shoots Wesley with a traceable bullet to set up a meeting on board a moving train. Separating Wesley from Fox using his carefully chosen meeting place, he tries to talk down his son while fighting off him and Fox. Ultimately shot by Wesley while trying to save him, he reveals the startling truth while arranging for his son to find all his plans and intel. His long term planning ensures his posthumous victory and the destruction of all his enemies.
Nightmare Fuel: A garbage truck chock-freaking-full of the aforementioned exploding rats. Poor rats.
The fight in the moving train, which ends with at least a hundred people dead due to Fox's car getting debris stuck in the wheels and the train driver braking. This causes 3-4 carriages to derail off a bridge.
No Problem with Licensed Games: Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a fun, if short cover-based shooter with some clever gameplay ideas of its own. Somewhat surprisingly, it is far more restrained with its use of Bullet Time than the movie. It should tell you something about the quality of the game that it was released almost a year after the movie.
Signature Scene: The chase with the Dodge Viper, the raid of the Fraternity, and Fox curving the bullet engraved with "GOODBYE."
Strawman Has a Point: Wesley's boss may be verbally abusive, incredibly obnoxious, and a poor manager, but she does have a point in that Wesley should perhaps be doing his job rather than surfing the internet.
Anti-Climax Boss: Mr. Rictus (and his gang of supervillain cronies, if you take them all together as one boss). After being built up as a formidable threat, Wesley just plows through Rictus and his men with ease.
Complete Monster: Mr. Rictus was a devout Christian until an accident causing medical death led him to believe there is no afterlife. Deciding there was no reason for morality, Rictus becomes a sadistic supervillain, founding the Fraternity to wipe out all superheroes alongside his co-leaders. With a history of vicious raids to steal, torture, rape, and kill countless people at leisure, Rictus bores of his limited territory while the rest of the world is ruled by the other leaders of the Fraternity. Conspiring with the Nazi supervillain the Future, Rictus organizes a coup, personally torturing and raping the children of a rival villain to spite the man before killing him as well. After taking power, Rictus takes the Fraternity out of the shadows while allowing the Future free reign in his own plot to restart The Holocaust.
Crosses the Line Twice: There are some jokes that are hilarious solely because of how over-the-top offensive they are.
Wesley: Can you believe I raped an A-list celebrity and it didn't even make the news? That's how deep The Fraternity goes, my friend. Mr. Rictus: I don't rape goats, Mr. Gibson. I make love to them.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: As listed below, the comic goes out of its way to subvert and deconstruct the idea of an Escapist Character with Wesley. The story even ends with him calling the reader out. Despite this, his life is still pretty enviable: He gets to do whatever he wants, has an attractive girlfriend, can visit unlimited alternate universes at will, and suffers from no legal consequences.
Escapist Character: The comic is a very vicious deconstruction of the idea of an Evil Is Cool Escapist Character. Wesley Gibson is a put-upon hypochondriac loser whose girlfriend is cheating on him. Then he finds out that his deceased father was a supervillain assassin, so he assumes his father's vacant seat in The Masquerade, Takes a Level in Badass, and eventually becomes one of the most powerful people in the world. However, when we say "supervillain", we mean it. He becomes a mass-murdering psychopath who casually notes that he raped a celebrity, kills any innocent person who looks at him funny, and eventually calls out the reader for cheering him on.
The Fox is intentionally made out to be similar to Catwoman and her appearance was modeled after Halle Berry. Guess who ended up playing Catwoman (albeit In Name Only) in the film released the following year?
Right before sending the Detective and his sidekick to their deaths, Mr. Rictus gloats about how the Detective was once the most feared man in the world but now will only be remembered for his campy television show. A few months after the series ended, Batman Begins was released, which made the decision to revisit the Caped Crusader's roots as an intimidating vigilante after the failure of Batman & Robin.
Magnificent Bastard: The Killer is a supervillain with the innate "ability to end life". After banding together with the other supervillains of the world, destroying the heroes completely and rewriting reality to make ordinary people forget the old world, the Killer worked for decades as a Professional Killer for the Fraternity while keeping an eye on Wesley Gibson, his only son whom he was forced to abandon. The Killer fakes his own death so that Wesley will inherit his seat at the Fraternity and make a name for himself, then destroy the diabolical Mr. Rictus in an Enemy Civil War and take over from the Professor. Feeling his own age, the Killer knows that his days are numbered, and considers the only person worth killing him to be the one to carry on his legacy. Smooth, scheming, and deadly lethal, the Killer stands out as the most dignified of the comic's Card-Carrying Villains.
A lot of the main characters' problems would have been solved if Seltzer (who runs two continents to everyone's one) just let Rictus run South America.
In a more apparent case, Wesley's mother "wussifying" her son is presented as nothing but as a bad thing, but would anyone really want to have a son who would be the most dangerous murderer and gunning down the neighborhood kids before he even entered middle school?
Squick: There's plenty of disgusting stuff going on in this comic. One of the characters is a shapeshifter made of feces, human bodies exploding from Wesley's shots, cannibalism, Rictus in general...
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: In a fight between a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to continue ruling the world in secret and a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to rule the world openly, why should the reader really care who wins? Heck, you might as well root for the series' antagonist, Mr. Rictus. At least he's good for some Black Comedy (if you're amused by the slaughter of children). The You Bastard! ending seems to indicate that the author himself hates both the story, and anyone who read it through to the end. One of the possible interpretations is that he's condemning anyone who could accept a universe so devoid of hope.
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