John Wick is a hyper-violent, super slick, and undeniably entertaining iteration of the classic film genre: “You’ve messed with the wrong guy.”
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a man of both a fun-to-say two-syllable name and very few words. When we first meet him, he’s emerged, half-dead, from a smashed up SUV and crawling onto the ground. He pulls his cellphone out of his blood-splattered pocket and watches a video of him and his wife frolicking on a beach. Good times, man.
Then we flashback to a few weeks earlier. John Wick’s wife has just lost her battle with cancer and he’s inconsolable, until he receives a gift she sent him right before she died: a little Beagle pup that she instructs him to love.
He bonds with the pooch—in his own fumbling, tough guy way—and names it Daisy. One day, he plops Daisy into the front seat of his tricked out ’69 Mustang and takes her to an empty lot where he does some high speed donuts (that, in reality, would either send Daisy hurtling through the windshield to her death or puking all over the leather upholstery, but I digress). Later, at a gas station, he’s approached by a Russian mobster’s punk son, Iosef (Alfie Allen, from Game of Thrones), who wants to buy the car. “It’s not for sale,” John Wick says. “Everything’s for sale,” Iosef replies.
Yup, you guessed it. The punk and his mobster buddies show up at John Wick’s house that night, beat John Wick to a pulp, steal John Wick’s car and—oh the humanity—kill John Wick’s dog.
Now they’ve gone too far.
Instead of being proud of his son’s car-stealing, dog-assassinating ways, Iosef’s father, the mob kingpin Viggo Tarasov (Michel Nyqvist), is furious—and maybe even a little afraid. He demonstrates his disappointment by punching his son in the gut, making him vomit. (I’m glad somebody finally vomited). Meanwhile, John Wick is taking a sledgehammer to his own basement, unearthing a secret arsenal. It’s, as the kids say, go time.
The best thing about these early scenes is we’re still not totally sure who John Wick is. We know that, as played by Keanu in his Matrix-era fighting trim with a beard that suggests he means business, he looks super cool. We know that he’d been out of the “game,” whatever the game may be. We know that people like to say his first and last name a lot (he must have a very good brand management team.) We also now know that even scary Russian kingpins fear him. (Or, to borrow some Breaking Bad parlance, “He is the one who knocks.”)
Turns out, before he retired to a life of wedded bliss, John Wick was part of an underground network of hit men, who live by their own code and conduct business at “The Continental,” a kind of Hilton Hotel for bad, bad men (and women). There’s basically one rule at The Continental: You can’t put a hit on a fellow guest. If so, your membership is, um, revoked.
Arch, craggy, vaguely reptilian actors like Willem Dafoe, Lance Reddick, and Ian McShane are on hand to add to the cool factor. (Frankly, I would’ve loved an entire film set at The Continental focusing on Reddick’s unflappable concierge). The film has an extraordinarily high body count, but no two kills are the same, each death is like its own little blood-splattered snowflake. Filmmakers Derek Leitch and Chad Stahelski positively love to kill people.
It’s all supremely silly stuff—with those all-too familiar tropes of the saintly wife, the hitman trying to reform who gets PULLED BACK IN, the ne’er do well son of a gangster, all those thick Russian accents—but that’s kind of the point. Keanu looks great and actually is great—if you can get past that maddeningly affectless voice of his (alas, he’ll never lose that). And directors Leitch and Stahelski have made a cinematic calling card for themselves. You want an unusually stylish bloodbath served up with flourish and a wink—they’re your guys. All others, please apply elsewhere.