Every now and then an adrenalin pumped, comic book action adventure will decide that style and substance can exist in the same universe. That art and commerce can reach for the same goal, and that carefully crafted characters aren’t an anathema to high octane, edge of your seat thrill-ride cinema. And that film is The Dark Knight.

Wanted, on the other hand is exactly the kind of weak schlock you’d expect it to be.

Helmed by Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Day Watch), Wanted sees the acclaimed Russian action director reprise, with aplomb, exactly the kind of shallow, kinetic, stylistic experience his Hollywood masters were hoping for in his first English-language outing. In other words: If you’re the kind of person who relishes the sight of CGI bullets flying in slow motion into the head of a nameless, faceless bad guy for no other reason than the really cool CGI blood splatter; then Wanted is the film you.

Incongruously, Wanted features a stellar cast of Academy-award-winners (Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman), alongside Academy-award-nominees (James McAvoy and Terence Stamp), and except for Freeman (who phones it in) they all struggle to do the best they can with their empty bucket of clichés, plot holes, and posing.

McEvoy is the Joe Nobody; plucked from obscurity to fulfil his destiny as a super assassin by a mysterious group called The Fraternity. Freeman plays the patient, softly spoken, wise-old-black-man who runs The Fraternity, and Jolie has a nude bottom/side-boob scene, says little, drives a car fast, and takes up most of the poster. Stamp lives in a monastery and ... oh, who cares?

The lightweight script was phoned in by the two guys who previously banged on a keyboard with a raw chicken leg for so long that they accidentally co-wrote 2 Fast 2 Furious; with their first draft apparently so turgid that another writer was brought on board to clean things up.

Unfortunately that was Chris Morgan, the guy who spoke unintelligible French into a piece of dodgy English-language dictation software and accidentally wrote The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

After Morgan’s attempt Bekmambetov apparently took a stab at the script himself, before another writer was brought in to shoehorn Jolie’s character in there (probably considered a necessity to justify the poster thing). Who knows? Perhaps they were just five or six writers away from coming up with something resembling coherence.

Wanted rates 1 star.