It’s an old cliché of Hollywood adaptations that they completely gut novels of their substance and turn them into easily digested, formulaic schlock that panders to the lowest common denominator. But now Hollywood can’t even make decent schlock.

The makers of Wanted took Mark Millar’s violent, seedy, amoral and damn entertaining graphic novel and stripped it of everything that made it worth adapting in the first place. You can picture the development exec asking: “Can we make the protagonist more relatable? Can we make them good assassins?” Then you can imagine a series of such meetings until all that was left of the original work was the gimmick of characters making bullets bend in mid-trajectory (Hey, it worked for The Matrix!).

James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie all just seem embarrassed to be there.

Grade: F

Wanted is currently available.