The derisive laughter begins in the opening seconds of "Wanted," when a title card informs us that a thousand years ago, a group of weavers decided to form a secret society of assassins.

Weavers, we chortle. Assassins. That may be the stupidest thing we've ever seen.

Ah, but it is still the opening moments. There is an entire movie to go, and incredibly it just gets ever stupider.

Many of the poor souls who wind up watching this thing will say the most idiotic part of the film involves a train that derails while on a bridge and falls, oh, maybe 17 miles down into a chasm, lightly bruising the passengers.

But for me, the most idiotic scene has to be the one with the Loom of Fate. Seriously, the Loom of Fate. I know, I couldn't believe it either.

See, the sect of weaver-assassins built a giant loom that would tell them -- in binary code hidden in the thread patterns -- the name of the next person who is to be assassinated.

It's a good thing it wasn't a bunch of 11th-century plumbers who decided to become assassins. Can you imagine the Giant Toilet of Doom?

James McAvoy, who will want to delete this entry fromhis résumé, stars as Chicago nerd Wesley. He hates his job, he hates his boss, and his only friend is sleeping with his girlfriend. But his biggest problem, according to the film, is He Doesn't Know Who He Is.

He soon finds out. A gang of latter-day weaver-assassins (and for reasons never explained, one hog-butcher assassin), tells him he is one of them. Then they savagely and repeatedly beat him (but it's OK,'cause they have a magic bath that cures all ills) and refuse to answer any of his perfectly logical questions.

Then they force him to shoot the wings off flies and teach him how to blow up rats with plastic explosives.

OK, time for a reality check. Obviously, reality has nothing to do with a movie like "Wanted," but this is important. Pulling the wings off flies and killing small animals are classic early indicators of a psychotic personality. Almost all serial killers, for instance, begin that way. The writers might want to seek professional help, is all I'm saying.

The leader of the murderous weavers is Morgan Freeman, and the one who takes Wesley most under her tattooed wing is played by Angelina Jolie. The two show Wesley how to give bullets a curved trajectory, and the scene in which he finally learns how is the film's best. It is also the only good scene.

Director Timur Bekmambetov, whose previous work has literally been in Russian-language vampire movies, shakes the camera a lot, as if trying to dislodge a coin he dropped in it. It doesn't help the film, though, which he directs in a hyperactive style certain to alienate the audience.

The one trick the film keeps returning to, the thing that makes Wesley such a good assassin, is that his mind and body can move so fast they make everything else slow down to almost a standstill.

This bullet-time special effect was a clever idea in "The Matrix." In "Wanted," it's the whole movie.