Wanted

For twenty minutes or so this was little more than a diverting juvenile fantasy, most likely I presumed to have been dreamed up by men around my own age who had spent the best part of the 90s sitting in their cubicles after work playing Unreal Tournament, Half Life and Doom, pausing only to tell each other how awesome The Matrix was.

In fact it's the same 3-man team of hardware festishists that brought us other enjoyable examples of dumb fun like 2Fast 2Furious. But in this flick the dumb fun quickly becomes significantly less harmless, drifting into distastefully amoral territory, before trying less than successfully to return to dubiously sympathetic ground as the plot is doubled back on itself.

"Six months ago I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you," muses our 'hero' Wesley Allan Gibson on his lifestyle change. As if possession of a firearm and a remit to shoot strangers is the true path to a meaningful existence.  A decade or so or go this kind of scurrilous nonsense could have featured desperate C-list talent - or maybe even Jean-Claude Van Damme - but now, mysteriously, major thesps are drawn to it.