Keanu Reeves (David Lee/Lionsgate)
John Wick may be the best action movie of the year. It is definitely the best action movie of the year to quote The Room.
Michael Nyqvist, the reliable Swede who played Mikael Blomkvist in the Dragon Tattoo films, plays Russian villain Viggo Tarasov, and it would be a spoiler to tell you how he (and Derek Kolstad’s efficient, clever script) directly invokes Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic. John Wick is that kind of movie. It’s a brutally violent action flick that recalls the frenetic bloodshed of John Woo and Gareth Evans without quite reaching those levels of intensity, and Nicolas Winding Refn without reaching his cool style. What John Wick has that its predecessors don’t is comic timing.
Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a highly skilled former assassin who loves classic muscle cars. But the movie opens with an injured Wick weakly driving an SUV into a retaining wall. This sets up a series of flashbacks in which in short order we see Wick with his wife, who collapses on a pier and soon dies. Her funeral sets up Wick’s uncertain relationship with Marcus (Willem Dafoe), who offers enigmatic condolences on a rainy day of mourning. Inclement weather can be an overused cinematic shortcut, but here sheets of rain serve as operatic emphasis, a cleansing device that comes back at the film’s climax.
The distraught Wick soon receives a special delivery: his wife, knowing her (undisclosed) illness would soon kill her, arranged to have a beagle puppy sent to her husband, with a letter she wrote for him to prepare him to grieve with the help of a furry companion. It’s an evil little puppy, looking at you and Keanu with big, vulnerable, playful eyes. But this adorable idyll is over all too soon when an encounter with Russian mobsters at a gas station sets off a chain of events that leaves the New York underground a bloody mess.
The basic premise of John Wick is that of the retired assassin who turns to a domestic and relatively contemplative life, only to have his illusion of peace destroyed, vividly reviving the killer instinct that lay dormant. This is essentially the plot of Nicolas Cage’s terrible VOD actioner Rage, released earlier this year. The two films are a study in contrast. Rage gave Cage a chance to let loose in a few scenes of his signature hammy madness, but it also gave him terrible writing and direction. Nobody has ever accused Reeves of overacting, but John Wick places Keanu in a context of a deadpan stoicism turned violent that vaguely suggests what a young Iron Eyes Cody might have been like had he taken bloody revenge on litterbugs.
There is not much in the way of character development. When Tarasov’s son Iosef (Alfie Allen) gets on the wrong side of Wick, the reactions of other characters, from Tarasov to garage owner Aurelio (an effective John Leguizamo), essentially build up Wick’s character. Their acting chops raise up a limited figurehead, which seems to be a political metaphor that turns an old saw upside down: it takes a village to raise an assassin. Reeves doesn’t let his supporting cast down. He kills real good, from well-choreographed gunplay to mano-a-mano combat with a series of would-be bounty hunters who turn the movie into something of a farce. But co-directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski are both former stuntmen and have a good sense of how to photograph chaos, and Kolstad’s script gives the characters just enough sugar to make the blood go down easier. John Wick is bloody and effective, but even more than a cathartic bloodbath, it offers laughter and puppies.
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Directed by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski
Written by Derek Kolstad
With Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe,
Rated R for strong and bloody violence throughout, language and brief drug use
Running time 101 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you.
