John Wick

Keanu Reeves is an actor that hasn’t always been a favorite among casual moviegoers. Though he’s been connected to several popular films that have made him into a familiar name like Point Break, Speed, the Bill &Ted movies, and especially the Matrix movies, his awkward lifeless style of acting mixed with his ‘surfer bro’ demeanor meant that it didn’t take too long for his career to start going downhill, once that style of acting stop being popular. With a life as tragic as his, it is a real shame that a majority of his movies never allowed him to show off some truly great acting skills. The 2014 action film, John Wick changed that very quickly, and shot Keanu back up to the realms of star power that he hadn’t even reached in his previous run. After recently losing his wife to undisclosed means, John Wick (played by Keanu Reeves) finds that she left him a puppy to care for in her absence, allowing him someone to mourn with and hopefully give him the positive connection he needs to proper move on. However, the mourning isn’t quite completed as a group of Russian thugs, led by Iosef Tarasov (played by Alfie Allen) break into his house, beat him down and murder his puppy all so that he could steal his car. Leaving him beaten, they aren’t aware that they have awaken the fury of someone who was once considered the deadliest assassin that was once under the employment of the father of Iosef, Viggo (played by Michael Nyqvist). After attempts to talk Wick down are ignored, Viggo fears the storm that is about to come and places several hits out on Wick in an attempt to slow him down, even getting John’s old mentor, Marcus (played by Willem Dafoe). But it is painfully clear that nothing is going to stop Wick from getting his revenge, and he will go through whatever goon, hitman, or assassin to enact his kill and remind the world of why he was once called the ”Baba Yaga”. With a premise that seemed pretty standard, a bunch of new talent behind the camera that casual audience members weren’t privy to yet, and with Reeves not being in anything major for a long time, the movie didn’t seem like it would leave that big an impact. Against all odds, John Wick blew the world away with a fresh new, amazingly engaging, fantastically acted, perfectly paced, blood-pumping movie that made it one of the key action films of the decade.

The movie originally started off as a movie named Scorn with a much older anti-hero type figure seeking vengeance on those who wronged him yet was quickly changed around when Reeves entered as the lead. With so many action movies available to the public nowadays, it’s incredibly difficult to not only make something unique, but also something that is made with quality, dedication, and passion; making what could come off as simplistic and shallow into something complex and memorable. This movie is clearly inspired by several famous films that take the medium of film-making and use it to their fullest advantage, with thematic and visual ties to spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, John Woo’s The Killer, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercie Rouge and Le Samourai, John Boorman’s Point Blank, Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man from Nowhere, and Park Chan-wook’s The Vengeance Trilogy. The movie takes a page out of classic storytelling tropes and presents a world and environment that is brilliantly teased and established through visual clues and context seeded through the dialogue, meaning the film doesn’t need an overwritten script to lay the groundwork around its action, and instead has a narrative that is easy to grasp and doesn’t require a lot of talking, but still has a unique flair to its world and characters and can show off with its stunts and set pieces. In a genre that doesn’t always have complex stories, the extra steps taken to evolve this film to something more than just a generic action flick is really appreciated. With the concept simple but relatable and the characters being colorful but gritty, it creates for a very entertaining world where it’s neither too serious or too goofy, and one that’s just slightly above real-life, but still grounded and incredibly brutal. Both originally being stunt coordinators, directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, have been attached to several other flashy action movies and are aware of how to compose the film to not be stale in its pace and staging. Being their directorial debut, both men expertly pace the film to never got boring and let this plot breeze by incredibly quickly, while still featuring plenty of material to chew on in that hour and a half running time. One of the only criticism that could come onto this film is that despite its perfect pace and story-progression, the final ten minutes feel pretty uninteresting and unneeded, capping off the movie on a less engaging but still decent enough end.

The characters have a sense that feels incredibly 80s about them in the best way possible. In those specifically good 80s action movies, each character, regardless of screen-time, was able to get across a personality, a level of intrigue and motive, and enough of a presence that made people feel like they got them in such little time. Practically every character works like this here, and that comes from fantastic writing and fantastic acting. All these actors are aware that they’re in a serious enough action movie, but with a style and tone that is more akin to an anime where the world and people are allowed to be a bit brighter and more packed with substance. The best performance easily goes to Keanu Reeves as Wick; for an actor that is known for acting very monotone and awkward, the level of preciseness in his words, his expressions and his motions in this film are honestly staggering. The emotion he delivers is remarkably genuine, it never feels tricky for him to do any of these fantastic stunts, and Reeve’s handles this ghostly presence of his character spot on, like a ghoul woken from the grave and out for blood. It almost feels like an entirely different person from what we’re used to, and Reeve’s deserves so much credit for how well he pulls it off. Other famous actors like Willem Dafoe and John Leguizamo also deliver some pretty impressive memorable scene despite the limited time. The villains are effective at being irredeemable monsters; Alfie Allen is able to play an unlikable person so effectively and Michael Nyqvist does a good job being the intellectual off-set to the regular grunt and mobsters the bad-guy side is stuck with, although it is a little odd that he is the final boss of the movie as he doesn’t look that intimidating from a physical standpoint.

The movie is much more stylized in terms of its action as opposed to other action movies of its type with this kind of set-up. Instead of a stationary one-at-a-time shooting fest, this movie utilities incredibly entertaining fighting techniques like Gun-fu, a fictionalized style of fighting that is a mixture of classic martial arts and gunplay, to provide some truly fast-pace, graphic and very engaging action scenes. Both director’s previous work with fight choreography allows every fight scene to be fluid and organic, with a right amount of brutality balanced with the graceful motion of the camera work that makes it feel ballet-like. The cinematography creates images that feel plucked out of an anime shot with how its framed and paced with the clean quick editing in many fight scenes that also call back to Hong Kong action cinema. The film’s lighting has a very distinct neon coloration to it that gives the movie an evasive clinical almost morgue vibe to it, which is perfectly fitting due to the carnage that is unfolding on-screen, although sometimes the obsession with the aqua color tone can be a little too much even if it is off set with other colors in moments. The writing is so good at blending its tone to the point where it can be brutal and harsh in one moment yet can still have an odd dry sense of humor for itself, the movie never feels too downhearted despite how bleak the opening act is. The dialogue immediately gives these characters chemistry and gives an idea of both character’s history without needing to be overstuffed with words. It could almost come across as hoaky or unrealistic if the world wasn’t as perfectly set-up to the point where none of it feels strange or out of nowhere.

John Wick proved the power that action movies can have if they use their material to its fullest and not half-try in its presentation. Every element about John Wick was given utmost attention and it resulted in a fantastic film with amazing elements left and right with a bunch that is worth coming back too. With an engaging and quick to grasp premise, excellent world-building, fascinating characters, perfect acting, amazingly choreographed fight sequences, wonderfully composed cinematography, and homages to so many famous action-oriented stories that it easily earns itself as one of the classics. And with Keanu Reeves seemingly being saved by the movie, his presence has been recognized and his new movies have proven to use his legitimate acting talents much better. A fantastic action movie that brought back a cool, honest, and kind-hearted dude into the Hollywood limelight and proved he was a legitimate talent worth looking at, what’s not to love. Absolutely worth a watch, it will definitely not disappoint.