Review: Angelina Jolie And "Wanted"

With roles in films such as "Girl, Interrupted" (for which she won an Oscar) and her latest, "Wanted," Angelina Jolie has attracted a host of admirers … and that includes our own David Edelstein:

Hollywood is full of swollen-lipped actresses, but Jolie has the spirit to match those tire-treads.

She burst out of the gate in 1998's "Gia," about the glowering supermodel who embodied a new kind of tough glamour and died of AIDS. I remember her blasting through a scene stark naked - sorry, folks, can't show it! - and admiring her fearlessness more than her body, which is saying a lot.

But Jolie has so large a presence she doesn't need to pull out the stops or take off her clothes. She can underplay dryly, toying with lines and co-stars, which is why she was so smashing as a sociopath in "Girl, Interrupted," devastating fellow patients to keep from turning her acid gaze inward.

Jolie has taken other "serious" parts, like Marianne, wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl in "A Mighty Heart," and she was very fine, tamping down the drama queen stuff.

But even dipped in caramel, she was still, obviously, Angelina.

Her greatest box office successes have been as witty action heroines, as in "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" opposite honey Brad Pitt, whose hard shell of narcissism held fast against her incinerating stares.

"Wanted" is in the same mode, but more spectacular: It's state-of-the-art state-of-the-art.

The plot is nonsense about a fraternity of supernaturally gifted assassins, a hodgepodge of "The Matrix" and "The Terminator." But Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov is a whiz at mixing fast- and slow-motion to screw up your biorhythms. You take an hour to come down and then say: I fell for that???

It's easy to fall for Angelina. There she suddenly is, beside timid protagonist James McAvoy, looking amused, twinkling, as if the whole gazillion-dollar movie is her toy. The bullets she fires seem like extensions of her will.

Does "Wanted" stretch her as an actress? Not remotely. We'll see that later this year, as the mother of a kidnapped child in Clint Eastwood's "Changeling."

What Jolie really needs to prove herself is material she can't toy with, parts bigger than she is. Hedda Gabler? Cleopatra? God?