Summit Entertainment
Rewind Movie Review is a feature where I review a movie I haven’t yet reviewed, but I didn’t see in the theater. Today: John Wick.
Revenge fantasies are a staple of action movies. In a lot of ways, it almost doesn’t matter why our protagonist buttkicker is taking revenge, because it’s often just about the motivation. This can fail, naturally, and you can lose any reason to care about the character. Some sort of empathy towards characters is useful for action movies, especially the ones with antihero leads. After all, we need some sort of reason to care about the morally troubled lead, otherwise when either tragedy or triumph later occurs, why should we bother?
But John Wick does it just right.
John Wick is an action movie released in 2014 starring Keanu Reeves as (naturally) John Wick. He’s a former master assassin, again, of course. That’s another check in the “list of revenge backstories.” But the revenge in question comes in an interesting way here. John has just lost his wife to illness, not anything tied to his former life of crime. That’s actually sort of unusual for a revenge fantasy, as there’s no way to demonstrate the dichotomy between murder as bad versus murder as good if you don’t have an innocent victim to obviously connect the dots.
The revenge actually starts because of Daisy, a dog left to him by his wife as a sort of “I hope this helps you” gift. Fine enough, that’s a nice start. But when he refuses to sell his classic Mustang to a bunch of obvious Russian gang members led by Iosef (the actually British Alfie Allen from Game of Thrones), they break into his house, beat him up, kill Daisy, and steal his car. So we’ve got our revenge and justice needed. John didn’t even really do anything explicitly wrong connected with his dog, he merely didn’t sell his car. Finally we’ve got a reason to root for him.
But there’s a fun layer. It turns out that Iosef’s father Viggo (Michael Nyqvist, who isn’t Russian either, amusingly enough) used to hire John as his chief assassin. He had a reputation for being so deadly, they called him ‘Baba Yaga’ or the Boogeyman. And now he’s coming to take revenge. Whoops! Of course, this leads John Wick to start killing people, mostly with guns, but also knives and strangulation as the need arises.
John Wick was a lot of fun, with almost no dull moments. tweet
There’s an unusual bit with a hotel for assassins that’s kind of Switzerland for them, no killing aloud, which is a bit weird, but this gives a chance to showcase some great supporting acting. You get Adrianne Palicki as another kickass mercenary with her own agenda, Willem Dafoe as a sniper with his own agenda, and Ian McShane as the mysterious owner of the hotel, again with his own agenda. The Russians’ agenda is of course, not to get killed by John Wick.
Any bets on them pulling that off.
This movie was a lot of fun, with almost no dull moments. It’s paced pretty well too, meaning you don’t get annoyed at the times without action. The choreography is pretty good, brutal but easy enough to follow, helped by the lack of shaky cam and clear direction. It helps that the co-director is David Leitch, a stunt coordinator, so we get to see some great stunt work by a large percentage of the cast.
Compare this to the sort of lumbering energy of Liam Neeson, and suddenly Taken seems slow and burdensome. John Wick is a classicly unkillable sort, but unlike something in The Expendables, it doesn’t seem ridiculous. Keanu Reeves’ capability for low energy just makes his killer more threatening and easier to empathize with, because he isn’t a jerk.
In two sentences: If you’re looking for a new action movie that’s just a bunch of killing, this is the movie you want to watch. Otherwise, watch Kingsman, but that’s good in a different sort of way.
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