Angelina Jolie plays the ultimate femme fatale in the ultraviolent Wanted.

Universal Studios / Chuck Hodes

Near the start of the high-octane fantasy-thriller Wanted, a bullet rips through the back of a man’s head and comes out his forehead, followed by bloody splatters. It’s here that you know Russian-born director Timur Bekmambetov will take no prisoners in Wanted, a no-holds-barred stew of violence and mayhem.

Wanted is one of the most graphically bloody films of the year, perhaps since the new millennium. It’s also masochistic, creepy, witty and often very funny in its offbeat take on the old assassin-movie plot. After all, eventually it will get to an army of rats on the march, each tiny rodent “soldier” saddled with a tiny bomb on its back, as they invade the headquarters of a 1,000-year-old assassination squad known as The Fraternity. Ratatouille it’s not.

But what Wanted is is wonderful lunacy, a cartoon vision that turns the very serious business of programmed murder into a wacky free-for-all. No surprise that it’s based on a comic book series — by Mark Millar and J.J. Jones — nor that Bekmambetov, who previously did the inventively eerie Russian war-with-the-vampires hits Night Watch and Day Watch, gives a smashingly fresh look to a plot that seems cut and dried.

James McAvoy, who was Idi Amin’s Scottish doctor in The Last King of Scotland and was overlooked at Oscar time for his work as the man wrongly sent up the river in Atonement, plays the wonderful schnook Wesley Gibson, who gets caught up in the shadowy world of assassins in Wanted and discovers that he likes it.

At the start of the film he’s a dorky, beleaguered accountant in a big Chicago real estate office, constantly belittled by his vile manager, Janice (Lorna Scott), and prone to anxiety attacks that leave him with dark circles under his eyes and reaching for pills to stop his hands from shaking. Wesley’s girlfriend is in the middle of a torrid affair with his best friend and co-worker. Wesley, hunched over and depressed, is not in a good way.

Enter the slinky, statuesque, multi-tattooed and seductively enticing Fox (Angelina Jolie). She spins a cockamamie story about being a member of an age-old assassination squad formed by weavers in Europe 10 centuries ago, and adds that Wesley’s long-absent father was one of the greatest assassins who ever lived, that he was recently killed by rivals and that The Fraternity has recruited Wesley to join them in the hope that his father’s genes will make Wesley as good a shot as his old man.

Of course Wesley doesn’t believe her, at least until a raging shootout between her and an assassin in a supermarket, followed by an insanely wacky car chase through the streets of Chicago, leaves milquetoast Wesley screaming for mercy. (It’s not a shock that screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas previously wrote the car-race film 2 Fast 2 Furious, or that co-writer Chris Morgan did The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.) In the middle of the chase, Fox shoots out the windshield of her car, lies down on the hood and fires wildly at her pursuer. At one point the car leaps a police car roadblock, knocks a bus on its side and then careens along the passenger windows of the upturned vehicle.

Impossible? Yes. But in the off-kilter world of Wanted, rats can be terrorists, an ice bath can cure even the most life-threatening wounds, a secret code can lie deep within the threads of a cloth’s weave and a shooter with the right stuff can avoid homicide by sending a bullet circling around an innocent party standing directly in its path. DO NOT TRY ANY OF THIS AT HOME!

Soon Wesley is at the headquarters of The Fraternity in a working textile factory (remember, they started out as weavers) that looks like a castle. The leader of The Fraternity, Sloan, played by Morgan Freeman at his most coolly matter-of-fact, makes a join-us-or-be-killed offer to Wesley that he can’t quite refuse. Soon he’s being pistol-whipped and pummeled in The Fraternity’s version of Assassination Boot Camp 101. Son of a gun, Wesley finds he’s liberated by the violence. The fact that his bank account has been increased by more than $3 million helps him overcome the severe beatings.

At one point Fox watches Wesley being beaten and stabbed with calm interest. At other times she seems more like a bemused bystander. Is she a temptress, as Wesley hopes, or just doing her job?

There are a lot of action pieces in Wanted that are improbable, yet lots of fun, including a leap off a tall building onto the roof of an elevated train car that’s passing below and the spectacular derailment of a long train on a bridge over a mountain gorge. There’s also a wonderful surprise twist late in the film that upends much of what the audience has been led to believe to this point.

McAvoy grows believably as the script ups the ante, his ordinary, downcast face taking on a glow as he discovers his previously untapped and unknown powers. His transformation is uplifting. Jolie, looking rather anorexic (except for her lips, of course), makes for a wonderful vamp, a little distant at first and yet temptingly accessible when need be. Terence Stamp turns up as a man who holds the key to Wesley’s past and is a lot more interesting here than he was as the arch villain in Get Smart.

Sometimes things can get a little too nutty: when Sloan shows Wesley a cloth-weaving machine and describes it as the “Loom of Fate” in the serious tone Freeman perfected while playing God; when someone stops a bullet in midair by having it collide with another bullet.

Incredible? Yes!

Something for the children? Definitely not!

But this adult “comic book” vision of Murder Inc. is a rollicking ride that’s a great deal of fun . . . at least if you don’t mind a lot of blood.

****Wanted

Starring: James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Common.

Rated: R, contains graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com