Rent it
Summary
Wanted Man gives us one of Dolph Lundgren’s most challenging characters to date who isn’t especially sympathetic at the start, but he has a nice arc and is never less than engaging. It may not have a huge budget, but we get about 3 or 4 decent action scenes making this a fun ride.
Plot: Johansen (Lundgren) is an aging detective, whose outdated policing methods have given the department a recent public relations problem. To save his job, he is sent to Mexico to extradite a female witness (Villa) to the murders of two DEA agents. Once there, he finds not only his old opinions challenged, but that bad hombres on both sides of the border are now gunning for him and his witness.
Review: One thing I respect about Dolph Lundgren is how fearless he is as a filmmaker; he directs and stars in Wanted Man and in this movie his character Travis Johansen is for the most part, a rather unsympathetic racist. He is caught on camera beating up a suspect, so his boss sends him to Mexico to rescue two women who witnessed a murder.
You can tell early on which way the story is going to go and there aren’t too many surprises about who the real villains are, but Wanted Man is one of Dolph’s better films of recent years. He comes across as world weary and I like how he incorporates his real life ankle injury into the story too.
At 82 minutes Wanted Man is mostly well paced with three or four action set-pieces in the brief runtime; we get a few shoot-outs which are well done, but you are aware the film doesn’t have a huge budget. This is more of a character piece with Johansen going through an arc which although we see it coming it’s nicely done and is never overly preachy.
The supporting cast includes Kelsey Grammer and Michael Paré in rather small but still significant roles; I love seeing Grammer in action movies as he isn’t the type of actor you’d expect to see in these kinds of movies usually.
Overall, Wanted Man provides one of Dolph Lundgren’s most interesting characters in several years and we get several bloody shoot-outs to keep things moving; I doubt it will make anyone’s best of the year lists but it’s still a solid action picture.