I like challenging movies. I enjoy films that make me think, that get me to question the way I see the world. Films like that are fun to dissect to their smallest detail, and a great joy to go over in my mind again and again. On the other hand, I also enjoy mindless gunslinging flicks with slick production and a ton of violence. Guess which one Wanted is?

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is introduced to us as a cubicle-dwelling nobody who Googles himself constantly, never getting any love. His whiney girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend, and he knows it. He suffers from frequent panic attacks, mostly brought on by his wench of a boss. After reading that, you understand that Wes is a loser. However, the movie drags this intro out for at least 20 minutes, repeating the same message. Look, writers, we get it: the guy sucks.

Thankfully, the film picks up when Wes meets Angelina Jolie (playing Angelina Jolie) and she saves him from some assassin and then they try to kill each other and then they run after the guy and it actually all happens like that, with no pauses, just a good old-fashioned fast-paced action sequence. Wes is then inducted into a thousand-year-old fraternity of assassins due to his super panic attack power (he’s not speeding up, he’s slowing the world down!) who get their jobs from a giant loom — which is incredibly stupid, but like the rest of the plot (including the predictable twist), it’s just an excuse for more people to get shot in interesting and graphic ways.

Actually, if Wanted gets anything right, it’s the approach to these scenes. Slow-motion is used extensively, but they’re fighting with guns, and a lot of the tricks these assassins can do involve the clever use of bullets, so it’s somewhat important the audience gets to see that. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, slow-motion is all over the place, but it doesn’t ever feel overused, and it doesn’t detract from the pacing of the action sequences.

That’s a good thing, because it would be a shame to screw up the action here. The set pieces are a lot of fun, what with bullets curving all over the place, and people shooting other bullets out of the air — there’s actually one scene in which a guy curves a bullet to hit his target, and his target curves one back to take that bullet out. When there is a break for a little plot advancement, the writers are smart enough to know that too much of a break is boring, we want more shootin’, and they give it to us. The final shootout is quite glorious, with our hero-ish running into a killer-filled room, throwing away his gun when it runs out of killin’ fuel and snatching a fresh one from the man he just shot dead.

I think now is a good time to mention that so far, for this witing gig, I have been taking notes in a little pad when I go see movies, just in case I forget something. I took far fewer notes for this movie than the others, barely a page’s worth. Just saying.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Wanted is basically Shoot ‘Em Up, but with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman (who swears, and it is wonderful) in place of Monica Bellucci and Paul Giamatti. Lots of people get shot, for some reason that we’re told but don’t care about, the action is goofy and fun, the effects are passable, the acting is not as passable, and if you possess the ability to turn your brain off, you’ll enjoy yourself.