Netflix hasn't said as much, but July looks like it's the month for female-led action.
It started with the return of Charlize Theron and her band of immortal warriors facing a formidable Uma Thurman in The Old Guard 2. And now it’s bringing back one of the earliest action outings from the actress who made the niche her own at the start of the 2000s. She, of course, is Angelina Jolie, and the movie is Wanted (2008), which Netflix has added today [Wednesday, July 16].
After her action debut in 2001 with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel two years later, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle Of Life, she returned to kicking ass in this thriller alongside James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Terence Stamp.
She stars as Fox, a skilled assassin who picks up bullied, anxiety-ridden office worker Wesley (McAvoy) in a bar and delivers the news that he’s now a member of the Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of killers.
The reason? It runs in the family: his late father was a member and Wesley has inherited his talents. Handed the opportunity to get his own back on his tormentors, he gets to work on honing his skills, only to discover that he’s destined to eliminate the man who killed his father.
It's pure comic book fare, based on Mark Millar's graphic novel of the same name and rejoicing in the sheer nonsense of it all. This is a world where guns fire round corners, where logic hardly gets a look-in and where suspension of disbelief is essential. The action is non-stop, with somersaulting cars and balletic gun battles producing the inevitable piles of bodies.
It’s no surprise that Jolie takes to it like a duck to water, but so does McAvoy, taking down a hundred men in one of the later scenes — with his gun barrel still stuck in the head of his last victim. Just think about it ……
There’s more. Exploding rats. A magic sewing machine. You get the picture. Director Timur Bekmambetov allowed his imagination to run riot, with the help of the images from the original book and a game for anything cast, especially the smouldering and witty Jolie and McAvoy, transforming from the office nerd to a stone-cold killer in lip- smacking style.
The over the top plot wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but the ingenuity that went into the action was hard to deny and it scored a creditable 71% on Rotten Tomatoes. Everybody agreed on one thing. It was enormous fun.
You will have fun watching Wanted
Rotten Tomatoes’ critics were less kind about Jolie’s two Lara Croft movies, even though her performance were singled out for praise. She was the perfect choice to bring the video game icon to life, but the consensus was that the films simply didn’t live up to her.
Between those two titles and Wanted came Mr And Mrs Smith (2005), perhaps her best known action movie and the one that paired her with Brad Pitt for an energetic comedy about a ridiculously attractive married couple who are both assassins and find themselves hired to kill each other. Doug Liman’s film may have received mixed reviews, but the on-screen chemistry between the two stars was tangible — we won’t go into the off-screen stories — and it pulled in big audiences all over the world, with box office takings coming close to $480 million.
Despite the success of her previous action films, Jolie wasn’t the first choice for what turned out to be her last, so far, in the genre. Philip Noyce’s Salt (2010) was originally intended for Tom Cruise, but was re-written so she could play the would-be Russian double agent, even though the changes were minimal.
Once again, she was seen as a great choice for the role, giving a no-holds-barred performance that allowed her to carry the film on her shoulders with ease.
Yet while Jolie was making this clutch of actioners, she was displaying an astonishing range as an actress, taking on titles such as Michael Winterbottom’s true life drama, A Mighty Heart (2007), in which she gave a heartbreaking performance as Mariane Pearl, who goes in search of her journalist husband when he goes missing in Pakistan.
The following year she starred in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated Changeling, this time as a mother whose son disappears and, when the police claim they’ve found him, refuses to accept the impostor. She was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, her first nod since her win in 2000 in the Supporting Actress category for Girl Interrupted.
More recently, she’s moved away from actioners, expanding into producing and directing as well as choosing roles as diverse as Maleficent (2014) and Maria (2024), which saw her playing legendary opera diva, Maria Callas. One of the best performances of her career, it was heavily tipped for Oscar glory, and her absence from the nominations shortlist raised more than a few eyebrows.
And while she’s not alone in taking on the physical demands of action roles — think Sigourney Weaver in the Alien series and Terminator’s Linda Hamilton in the 1970s and 1990s, as well as Theron, Thurman and Michelle Yeoh since the start of the 2000s — her track record shows that she’s yet to be overtaken as the number one female action movie star. It’ll be a hard job.
Wanted is on Netflix in the US and the UK. Maria is on Netflix in the US and on Prime Video in the UK.
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