Assassin Fox (Angelina Jolie) blasts baddies from the driver's side of her car while Wesley (James McAvoy, in mirror) looks on in the action-thriller Wanted. (Chuck Hodes/Universal Studios)

Like some kind of fanboy’s wet dream, Wanted is a composite of every bombastic blockbuster since, oh, 1977 – from Star Wars to The Bourne Ultimatum, with keynotes lifted liberally from The Matrix and Fight Club. So why does it feel so fresh? If I knew, I’d be making movies, not writing about them. And if I were making movies, I’d spend an awful lot of time and money trying to replicate this particular formula. It’s killer.

Wanted is based on a cult comic book by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, and its opening scene – a rooftop shootout where bullets fly across a city and curve around corners – establishes the film’s relentless, crackling flow of visual jokes and gaudy, hyperbolic action. The first half hour features two shootouts, in fact, and a car chase so obsessively detailed (a pet-food delivery truck is decorated with images of kittens) and delightful (Angelina Jolie, lying on the hood of a sports car, steering with her high-heeled feet while still managing to squeeze off dozens of rounds) that you’ll be hard-pressed to resist trying its tricks on the drive home.

Jolie is not the star of the film — Atonement’s James McAvoy is. But her impossibly sexy presence embodies the film’s tone of contemptuous cool. She first appears abruptly and unannounced, by the side of Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) as he waits at a pharmacy for his anti-anxiety medication. Wesley is a nebbishy accountant awash in self-loathing and bedeviled by the women in his life — namely, his doughnut-chomping boss and a kittenish girlfriend who’s shtupping his best friend. (One of many cute details: Wesley is such a loser that when he Googles himself, he gets no results.) It so happens that Jolie — whose character’s name is, amusingly, Fox — arrives at the pharmacy just in time to save Wesley from an assassin’s bullets. But she wants to save his life in more ways than one.

As it turns out, Fox is part of a 1,000-year-old secret order of assassins called The Fraternity, formed by a guild of weavers to “preserve balance in the world.” Wesley’s father, whom Wesley thought had died before he was born, was one of the greatest killers in The Fraternity, until he was gunned down by a rogue member. Now, the rogue wants Wesley dead, too.

Wesley (McAvoy, left) gets some target practice with guidance from The Gunsmith (Common, centre) and Fox.

But not if The Fraternity gets to him first, by training him to realize his own murderous potential. What Wesley had thought were panic attacks are actually an innate response that allows him to react to external stress much faster than other people. “You have the blood of a killer inside you,” intones Sloane (Morgan Freeman), The Fraternity’s soothing and solicitous doyen. Sloane demonstrates the young man’s talents by forcing a freaked-out Wesley to shoot off the wings of a fly.

What follows is Wesley’s brutal transformation from office drone to natural born killer. McAvoy tends to overplay the former, but he’s adept at the sangfroid required of the latter. It’s not a subtle process, and part of it involves Wesley being strapped to a chair and pummeled by a Brit named the Repairman. Over time, and with Fox’s bemused, barely benevolent guidance, Wesley becomes superheroic, able to surf on speeding trains, drive like a tweaking NASCAR racer and perform The Fraternity’s coolest trick: making bullets zigzag any way you want.

It’s never quite explained why weavers of all people created The Fraternity, but it does allow for a reference to something called The Loom of Fate (which gives the assassins their killing orders) and permits a lot of the action to take place in a medieval-looking textile mill.

Critics often complain when movies feel like amusement park rides: fast, with twists and turns that go nowhere, doing nothing more than raising your blood pressure. The movies that truly operate like that are actually quite rare, and Wanted does it shamelessly and with great glee.What saves this from being forgettable, juvenile nonsense is director Timur Bekmambetov’s strenuous attention to eccentric detail; for example, when a character bursts through a window, the glass sticks to his skin, transforming him for a second into a bizarre mirror man. Bekmambetov also refuses to rely on action cliché — the computer-generate imagery is wisely camouflaged with more traditional camera techniques (slow-motion, racking focus) that make, say, a passenger train falling into a canyon look both unreal and nerve-wrackingly plausible. (Curiously, this makes the film’s bloodletting – and there’s a lot – more breathtaking than stomach-turning.)

Jolie gets her orders from Sloane (Morgan Freeman). (Jaap Buitendijk/Universal Studios)

Wanted never attempts the kind of eggheaded subtext that made The Matrix and Fight Club such rich props for pop philosophy. If anything, Wanted disdains such pretension; it’s content just to be fun fantasy fodder. What’s more, it wallows in the very machismo that David Fincher sought to subvert. In Wesley’s case, self-realization is entirely a matter of “growing a pair” (as he commands himself); he also harbours some serious daddy issues. Jolie’s character is given a small degree of characterization, but she’s mainly reduced to priming Wesley’s psychosexual ardour: her long, tattooed limbs and switchblade-sharp cheekbones are sort of a walking, talking recruitment poster.

Like Wesley himself, you’ll spend most of Wanted’s two-hour running time with your heart pounding, teeth clenched, not quite sure where – or even who – you are. It’s a disorienting, short-lived but highly pleasurable feeling.

Wanted opens across Canada on June 27.

Jason McBride is a writer based in Toronto.