RT’s nabbed the exclusive new trailer for Wanted, Universal’s high-octane assassin thriller starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. And if you’re a fan of the Russian fantasy-horror Night Watch trilogy, you have even more reason to get excited.
If you’ve seen any of Timur Bekmanbetov‘s Night Watch movies (part three, Twilight Watch, is supposedly in production) then you should feel an instant familiarity with the new trailer for Wanted, Bekmanbetov’s English-language and Hollywood debut. Adapted from a limited-run comic book series by Mark Millar, Wanted is about a bookish young man (James McAvoy) who discovers that his late father was a super assassin and that he is next to join the ranks of a secret society of killers with superpowers led by Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie.
RT scored the exclusive new trailer for Wanted today (watch it here!), which should spark even more interest than when the first trailer and images (and those pics of Angelina Jolie’s fake tattooes) hit.
This new trailer goes way further to show us all the visual tricks and adrenaline-rush action that Bekmanbetov brings to the table. The aforementioned Night Watch and Day Watch films, box office record breakers in Russia, were awe-inspiring feats of special effects and invention similarly about a secret society of superpowered folk, some good and some evil, doing battle surreptitiously on the streets of modern-day Russia.
Curious additional parallels abound between Wanted and Night/Day Watch: deadly battles between good and evil; superhuman characters living among the regular world; a male protagonist who stumbles into it all and discovers his own potential. Further, Bekmanbetov’s cinematic flair in this second Wanted trailer — high-speed chases, onscreen action that bends the laws of physics, clever displays like Jolie hanging out of a speeding car, driving with her foot and McAvoy “bending” a bullet — should strike a note of recognition with fans of his horror-fantasy work. Bekmanbetov reportedly made both Night Watch and Day Watch for roughly $4 million each; it should be interesting to see what he can do with a Hollywood cast and a budget more than ten times that — $50 million, to be exact.
Watch the second trailer for Wanted here to see for yourself; the pic hits theaters June 27.
