Last year, John Wick received critical acclaim, which is unusual for a straight-up action film, which piqued my interest and piqued my ears in anticipation. Keanu Reeves plays the eponymous character, who is introduced as a grief-stricken shell of a man unstuck in time as flashbacks to his recently deceased wife’s decline and death from cancer fracture his reality, apparently looking for a Liam Neeson-like career redefinition in playing the kind of utter badass that would have made his more idealistic younger persona blanch. He’s saved for the time being by his wife’s final act of kindness: an adorable puppy she bought for him as an emotional keepsake.
A brief stop at a gas station results in a chance meeting with a trio of young Russian-American mob progeny, led by blonde prick Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), who has a crush on John’s vintage Mustang. John astounds them with his command of Russian and his fuck-off glare, but he also feeds their entitled arrogance. Before stealing the car, the trio breaks into John’s house, beats him up, and kills his dog. When Iosef takes the car to hot car broker Aureilo (John Leguizamo, effective), he realizes he’s bitten off far more than he can chew, which is first indicated when Aureilo fearlessly slaps Iosef in the face despite the fact that he’s the big boss’s son. Iosef’s father, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), is even more concerned to discover who has irritated his son, and for the first time, John’s full name is uttered, revealing itself as a shibboleth of fear, as Viggo also refers to him as Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman, or rather, “the man you send to kill the Boogeyman.” Wick used to be Viggo’s number one killer, a brilliantly talented hitman whose unleashed rage will undoubtedly be harmful to the health of many Tarasov employees.
The first twenty minutes of John Wick are worth repeating for the intelligent way first-time directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch communicate Wick’s emotional state while quickly sketching the storey essentials, making Wick appear a completely normal man in the midst of personal desolation, watched over by interested but not entirely welcome old friend Marcus (Willem Dafoe), while hinting at a hidden oddity to him. The revelation that Wick is a formidable demon not only from the same world as his tormentors but whose very name sends shockwaves of anxiety through that world is a pretty good one, evoking the same relishable switchback that drove Taken (2008) while taking it to another level, suggesting what might have happened to Tom Cruise’s unstoppable villain from Collateral (2004) if he’d been reformed and then grievously offended.
Regrettably, John Wick begins to deteriorate almost immediately and, by the end, demonstrates an inability to sustain dramatic involvement. Stahelski and Leitch demonstrate dynamic talents for action filmmaking that could result in a genuinely good genre film in the future. Both are former stuntmen—in fact, Stahelski was Reeves’ The Matrix (1999) stunt double and also played an agent—and, much like ex-choreographers make excellent musical shooters due to their understanding of the needs and abilities of their performers, the duo follow Need for Speed’s (2014) Scott Waugh in implying stuntmen have similar savvy. In a series of well-choreographed, flashily shot sequences that make great show of their own relentless functionality, holding their camera back and drinking in the spectacle of a dance of death, Reeves’ physical elegance, suggested but never quite properly exploited in The Matrix films, cuts swaths across the screen.
But I quickly realized there is a terrible sameness to the action scenes in John Wick, as Stahelski and Leitch prove much less talented not only in sustaining the rhythms of engrossing storytelling but also in coming up with twists on the basic bang-bang hostilities and new contexts for their haute couture violence, which devolves into a series of obvious confrontations in back streets, dockyards, and a nightclub, which is lit and decorated in 2012. The most intriguing aspects of the film depict the odd values of a not-so-far-underworld: a cop, after surveying a corpse lying in Wick’s corridor, politely lets him get on with his business, and Wick calls up a professional body disposal service run by David Patrick Kelly of The Warriors (1979) fame.
Lance Reddick plays Charon, the suggestively named, unfailingly cool desk clerk at the Continental Hotel, a ritzy New York hostel used as a meeting place and safe house by underworld hoods and guns-for-hire, a sliver of Fritz Lang-esque cordoned reality owned by sanguine plutocrat Winston (Ian McShane). Gold doubloons are the primary currency in this world, and strict rules are enforced to protect the Continental’s neutrality. The intentionally ahistorical vibe here—goth punk tattoos rub shoulders with jazz singers and chivalrous expectations of behavior—suggests Tim Burton’s Batman and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City films, and suggests John Wick is swerving into some interesting world-building territory. Despite being based on an original script by Derek Kolstad, these touches add to the impression that the film is based on a cultish graphic novel.
However, as with many lesser graphic novel adaptations, the work eventually reveals a flimsy, undercooked aspect, with the fetishized tropes that can be elegantly worked through on the page left looking stark and drab on screen.
Another issue is that the film’s “no-nonsense” quality, which many have praised, strikes me as just nonsense, a series of illogical actions that fatally deflate the desired sense of melodramatic urgency.
The idea of basing an action film on the murder of the antihero’s dog has a spoof quality to it, a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of emotional impetus that readily plays to the audience, which, as Stephanie Zacharek once accurately noted, is often far more easily offended by violence to animals on screen than to humans, often with the suggestion that they’re stand-ins for children, a suggestion that is especially strong here.
But John Wick is far from satirical; in fact, it’s exhaustingly straight-faced as it offers up such tired tropes with slightly new twists, such as the hero, wounded and lying in the rain, staring at his wife’s image, this time on a smartphone rather than a faded tintype or Polaroid.
The film is unconcerned about the disconnect between crime and punishment, content to let us watch Wick murder sixty or seventy people in order to work out his grief and anger issues. Some may appreciate this as a refreshingly blunt and amoral pretext for a revenge play, and I might have appreciated it in a different context, but it irritated me here. Wick’s vengeance is, of course, motivated by the sense that he’s been robbed of his one emotional salve by the world’s brutal and unreasonable people, who already deserve everything they get, but the film never becomes genuinely exciting because nothing is at stake.
Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)
Stahelski and Leitch begin with a flash-forward that appears to show Wick on the verge of death and then circle back to this scene at the end, a la Brian De Palm’s Carlito’s Way (1996), only to reveal it to be a grammatical decoy before a cringe-worthy final scene.
Reeves plays the one scene in which he loses his cool, when prostrated in front of Nyqvist’s godfather, with surprising force, displaying the animalistic pride hidden beneath the man’s cool exterior. Nyqvist is also good, playing a bad guy who feels strangely powerless in the face of what has been unintentionally unleashed and so vents his rage in a roundabout way.
Allen is stuck reprising his Game of Thrones role as a callow jerk whose gift for inflicting sadism is readily and repeatedly returned. Once set up, the film around them is offensively uninterested in complicating its drama or deepening its character reflexes. There is no creativity in the set pieces, no lines of memorable salty dialogue, no dramatic irony cruxes, and no expectation reversals. What has been praised as the film’s directness is actually a desultory lack of wit or cleverness.
As much as some appear to be relieved to see the action genre reduced to prettily shot sequences of people killing each other for no apparent reason, I object. We get a helpmate in the form of Marcus, who saves Wick’s bacon for hazy reasons despite Viggo’s offer of $2 million to take him out, presumably because he has some kind of fatherly or comradely feeling for him, and a talented antagonist in the form of Ms. Perkins (Adrianne Palicki, relishing the unhinged aggression of her role at least).
However, both characters are thwarted by Kolstad’s illogical plotting and the covert banality of Stahelski and Leitch’s directing, and both meet their demise in embarrassingly limp anti-climaxes. The film wants to get lost in a flurry of lunatic emotion expressed through mucho ass-kicking, but it never connects with that sense of mad intensity; it resolves with a final fight between hero and villain that is so insignificant that I admit I fast-forwarded through it.
The final third of John Wick is an increasingly desperate study in how a film can drag on and on without purpose, even though it’s only a little more than an hour and a half long. If this is the future action film, I’ll take the past.
