After over a decade of cultural diffusion — marketing campaigns for four movies and now a spin-off, countless memes, the character’s appearance in video games — the act of actually watching any of the John Wick movies seemed like just a formality. I assumed that whatever magic was inside had dried up a long time ago, and I was impossibly late to the party.
But after watching the first movie, I suspect that it might’ve been excellent timing. This is a movie about a character whose reputation precedes him. So much of John Wick is devoted to scenes establishing what a fearsome bad-ass John Wick is, without actually showing him being a bad-ass. I’d imagined it would be an hour and a half of non-stop slow-motion gunfights in purple-lit nightclubs, but that doesn’t really make up the bulk of the running time. Instead, we get lots and lots of people telling us how scary he is.
This is delivered best by the bad guy Viggo, a mobster who talks about Wick as if he were a fairy tale. He’s not the boogeyman; he’s the guy they send to kill the boogeyman! Much of this is in Russian, with stylized subtitles filling much of the screen, certain words given particular emphasis.
They’re light on specifics. The only actual story I can recall is when Viggo says that Wick once killed two men with just a pencil. A pencil! I felt like I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this detail, though: I’ve already seen The Dark Knight and don’t consider it that much of a stretch to imagine how a pencil could be used as a lethal weapon.
As it is, the first time we see Wick really show his stuff is when he kills a bunch of dudes (presumably; they’re in masks) trying to get into his house, in a vain attempt to stop his pending killing spree. We know that he kills twelve of them, but I’ve got to say it feels like pretty rote stuff. Certainly more home intruders than I would be able to kill, but not exactly an unprecedented number for an action movie.
But by that point, the movie has done a really good job of establishing its vibe. I was already familiar with a lot of the “Wick-iverse” from the aforementioned cultural diffusion, so I knew about the hotel that catered to assassins and had a strict code of no-killing-allowed. But I’d imagined that all of it would be bigger, or given out in small dollops of lore across at least the first two movies.
Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint in John Wick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story, coasting mainly on vibes and mood. Apart from repeating what a bad-ass John Wick himself is, there’s very little exposition, and it’s all streamlined and economical. You know very quickly who each character it is, and which role they play in this story. The simplicity really does give it the weight of modern mythology: a bunch of archetypes playing their parts in a simple story about revenge.
And about this recurring idea of “honor among killers,” which is bullshit in the real world but makes perfect sense in an action movie that’s presented almost like a fable.
If anything, I wish they’d gone farther into making Wick a super-hero. Have him doing five-finger death punches and the like, without ever breaking a sweat. When commenting on one of his many wounds, he admits that he’s “rusty.” But it creates this weird dissonance where everyone talks about him as if he’s a super-human killing machine, but the movie also wants us to relate to him as a John McClane, seat-of-his-pants type. I think it would’ve been stronger if they hadn’t bothered to put any tension around his getting wounded or kidnapped, but instead made the stakes all about his allies being in jeopardy, or simply the chance that his target will get away.
I definitely wouldn’t add John Wick to my list of favorite action movies, but I was impressed by how confidently it seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do. And how it seemed to suggest a story, a history, and a world much bigger than anything they needed to actually show us.
Related to timing, part of why John Wick hit so hard the year it first came out was because it was so obviously and interestingly the only practical stunt effects movie that year or just about any year to either side of it. It’s a practical stunts showcase from a director who is a stunt professional and in this “we’ll underpay large teams of CG artists to do everything in post” era.
I find it particularly easy to compare John Wick to Deathproof, the Tarantino half of Grindhouse and ode to low budget practical stunt films, which I also love. John Wick is a low budget grindhouse-style practical effects movie in every practical way (not just an ode to one). It is amazing it has become so much “a franchise” from such humble beginnings.
John Wick 2 I started making sure to catch them all in theaters. JW2 is probably one of the most interesting uses of “Chekov’s Armory” in its “gun fu” I’ve ever seen, but part of what made it particularly stand out was I was fortunate enough to catch it sitting next to some drunk “semi-pro” Halo players that were able to ammo count the guns accurate enough to call reloads. I’m not a gun person, but that was neat attention to detail by both the filmmakers and the weird theater audience I was in and I respect that.
John Wick 3 has some of the coolest animal stunts in any movie. Part of what sells it so well is that Halle Berry trained for a couple years to be the only on set animal trainer, so the dogs really are following nothing but her commands and looking at no one but her. It’s an incredible dedication to stunt work and yet Halle Berry is humble about it and liked to remind interviewers it was barely a fraction of the work Keanu has been putting in for John Wick stunts.
Anyway, yeah, I love a lot of little things about John Wick both the first movie for what it was and so far what the other movies have delivered. (I still have not watched the Peacock show thought, because it was a Peacock exclusive and because no one I asked said it was worth paying for Peacock to watch.)