The usual Hollywood MO is a great trailer attached to a bad movie. Let’s face it, the trailer is the only part of a movie that really counts. That’s what gets you into the movie, and once you’ve paid for your ticket, it doesn’t matter whether or not you like the movie, because they’ve already got your money. Mission accomplished.

But sometimes someone in Hollywood messes up, like in this new movie. The trailer for Wanted was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. All the way through watching it, I kept thinking, “Haven’t I already seen this movie?” On the basis of the trailer, I put it at the bottom of my summer must-see list. So imagine my surprise when I went to see to anyway (hey, that’s my job) and it turned out to be the most gleefully kick-ass action movie I’ve seen in years. Or at least since last autumn’s Shoot’ Em Up, a great movie that no one went to see.

Adapted from a comic book series, Wanted stars James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, an office drone who makes Peter Parker look like James Bond. Life changes for him when he is recruited by The Fraternity, a secret group of assassins with one of those thousand year backstories you only get in comic books. (They are also weavers, and the way they get their assignments is so ridiculous it still makes me laugh.) It seems Wesley’s father, who he never knew, was their top operative, and these talents are genetic.

But enough plot. Wanted was directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who grew up as a child in Russia watching the films of John Woo and Quentin Tarantino and thinking, eh, kinda wussy. He made two spectacular fantasy-action films in his homeland, Night Watch and Day Watch, that would have been huge hits in the US but for the fact that the audience for this kind of movie reacts to subtitles like Dracula does to garlic and crucifixes. Now that he’s working for Hollywood, where they can afford to buy him new stunt cars faster than he can wreck them, there’s no stopping him.

The movie also stars Morgan Freeman (who got a huge laugh from the preview audience with a well-delivered 12-letter expletive), Terence Stamp, and Angelina Jolie, who, in what may be an example of dark Eastern European humor, seems to be eating about half the time she’s onscreen. It opens the same day as the kiddie movie Wall-E, but this one has an R rating and earns it. If there’s a more entertaining movie waiting in the wings this summer, I will be very very surprised.

—m. faust