By Preston Wilder
Keanu Reeves is John Wick, the world’s greatest hitman. His hair is lank, his face artfully stubbled. He sleeps in a room without curtains, just a panoramic view of the city; the light doesn’t bother him, since he always gets up at dawn anyway. It’s not clear what he does for fun. Our only glimpse of him relaxing – before the plot begins in earnest – is when he drives his 1969 Ford Mustang at top speed down an airport runway, brakes squealing as he swivels and swerves. Maybe he does it to stay in practice for high-speed car chases – but in fact there’s no need to stay in practice, because John is retired. Then again, maybe he does it as a kind of therapy, to block out his grief – because John is in mourning, his beloved wife having recently died.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to this life,” offers Marcus (Willem Dafoe), a fellow hitman – but John finds a little inner peace when a package arrives containing a puppy, which his late wife arranged for him to receive after her death as a kind of love token. The puppy is cute, friendly, even housebroken – but then John has a brief encounter at a petrol station, accosted by a thuggish young Russian who demands to buy his Mustang and scowls darkly when told the car isn’t for sale. That night, the Russian and his friends break into John’s house, steal his car, beat him to a pulp with metal bats – and kill the puppy! Are they mad, or just stupid? Don’t they know who they’re dealing with?
Turns out they don’t – but everybody else does. The young thug’s father is Viggo (Michael Nykvist), a ruthless gangster who nonetheless blanches when he hears what his son did. “He stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog,” comes the report, and Viggo goes very quiet: “Oh,” is all he can muster. Everyone knows John Wick. He’s a VIP at the Continental, the hotel where professional killers can relax and pay the suave concierge in gold coins (the film seems to be set in a wittily-sketched alternate universe). Even the cops know John Wick. After he single-handedly butchers a dozen thugs sent to kill him – grappling, shooting, occasionally stabbing – the doorbell rings and a uniformed officer is standing there, come to investigate a noise complaint. The cop peers through the half-open door, sees the house strewn with bloody corpses and looks at John, puzzled: “You working again?”.
John Wick is a new kind of action film: abstracted, self-consciously pared-down, perched on the edge of pastiche, so ironic it becomes un-ironic. What you expect to happen happens: John takes revenge, bloodily and methodically. It shares some DNA with The Raid, another film with a videogame structure (first-person shooter games are explicitly referenced), and even The Counsellor, another film that deliberately refused to surprise its audience – though The Counsellor used that to reflect a grimly fatalistic Message whereas here it’s more of a nod to fellow geeks, a playful acknowledgment that we’re just here for the action scenes anyway.
Is that enough? Maybe, if the action scenes were dazzling – and I guess they are, for some people. The highlight is a shoot-out in a nightclub, starting off beside the Jacuzzi to the synth-poppy sounds of Kaleida’s ‘Think’ then moving to the main area, with its flashing blue lights; the movement is fluid (director Chad Stahelski has a background in stunt choreography), the colours kaleidoscopic – but what actually happens is essentially boring (and violent), which describes John Wick as a whole. It’s by now a cliché to point out approvingly that scenes like this treat violence as if it were dance – but in fact I’d be equally lukewarm about a musical drama that occasionally paused for dance numbers, if it failed to engage in terms of plot and psychology.
Technical credits are superb here; the look is expertly crafted (note the early scene in the cemetery, with the tombstones made to look like the skyscrapers in the distance). Even the violence gets intriguingly skewed by the Marilyn Manson song – pointedly heard on the soundtrack – that goes “We’re killing strangers, so we don’t kill the ones we love”, though it’s hard to link that line to anything in the film (maybe Marcus’ deliberate miss, if that’s what it was?). John Wick is smarter than it looks, but either too ambitious (in doing away with so much) or not ambitious enough. It’s a film for those who look at Keanu Reeves and think ‘Zen’ as opposed to ‘vacant’ – and perhaps those who associate him with The Matrix, as opposed to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Read my opening line again: ‘Keanu Reeves is John Wick, the world’s greatest hitman’. If that made you chuckle, you’re in the wrong movie.
DIRECTED BY Chad Stahelski
STARRING Keanu Reeves, Michael Nykvist, Willem Dafoe
US 2014 101 mins
