Meet Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy). He works in an unspecified capacity at an unspecified business in Chicago and is prone to anxiety attacks, frequently brought on by his abusive boss Janis. While Wesley toils away at the office, his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend in their Wrigleyville apartment, right next to a bar I pass every day on the train (cool!) - or, as Wesley's nagging girlfriend points out, right next to where the train passes every day. Wesley is broke, knows his girlfriend is cheating on him, and doesn't find anything  when he googles his own name, but he's finding it hard to care.

Soon a savior comes in the lovely form of Angelina Jolie (known in the film simply as "Fox," har har) and an ancient fraternity of assassins called . . . The Fraternity. Wesley's panic attacks, it seems, are not really panic attacks but a sort of superpower shared only by those in The Fraternity. Wesley's heart can beat healthily at up to 400 bpm, raising the amount of adrenaline in his bloodstream to a point that, like, time slows down and stuff.

Wesley has a personal stake in the missions of The Fraternity who, by the way, were founded by a group of weavers 1000 years ago and get their orders from a magic loom. Yes, that is as ridiculous in context as it sounds now. His long lost father has recently been murdered by a rogue agent of the group, and he has been recruited for the purpose of tracking down his killer.

Wanted is the typical Hero's Journey, more or less predictable but with flourishes that make it the summer's best action film so far. The stunts and action go way beyond ridiculous; this is a film whose car chase sequences make The Transporter look like a documentary of modern urban life. The kind of exaggerated exaggerations like the ones in Wanted's actions scenes usually put me off, as they make me far too conscious that I'm watching a film. It's hard to make a movie that pretends to some sort of commonality with our world but violates that verisimilitude all the time by regularly breaking the laws of physics.

But Wanted does it with such a sense of humor that the hyper-unrealistic action is enjoyable. And by "sense of humor" I don't just mean the nagging post-modern self-consciousness that so many modern action flicks exhibit. The film is genuinely funny at times, thanks to the self-deprecating wit of its main character. McAvoy supplies a voice-over narration and a wry performance that endears us to his character and fulfills a basic tenet of action films which so many recent ones seem to ignore, giving the audience a reason to root for the "good guy."

The movie also returns to what was once a sacred tenet of the action genre: the R rating. Call me a depraved young American, but I like my gunshots with blood. If someone gets dropped in a grinder, I want to see sanguine fountains (ahem, Live Free or Die Hard, ahem). And how will the nation's children learn the versatility of the word "fuck" if the action films are all PG-13? With the apparent success of big-budget R-rated action films like Wanted and 300, perhaps we'll soon see a return to the days when John McClane could actually say his catchphrase and Arnold Schwarzenegger's mangling of the English language extended to our four-letter expletives.

Wanted is a film of well orchestrated silliness. After it's over, you may have a hard time explaining to friends why it was so much fun to watch - especially if you start with the "founded by weavers" business - but it's a great popcorn movie. After being under-whelmed by most of the action films this summer movie season has lobbed in our direction, it was nice to see something violent that kept my attention. Plus, Angelina Jolie.