Movie Review : John Wick (2014)
Have you ever bought a Mudvayne record? Remember that uneasy feeling when you started skipping through songs and found out that you were sold a glorified single padded with like, 11 shitty songs? This is what going to the movies feels like to me. Hollywood is marketing every movie I loved back to me over and over again, repackaged and stripped of the original excitement of finding something that hadn't been done before.
JOHN WICK isn't exactly an oasis of originality, but it's a cohesive project that always remains within itself and that delivers the kind of experience several other movies failed to before. I usually have very little patience for movies like JOHN WICK, but it's a rare of a Brett Hart-like excellence of execution.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is not your normal retired hit man. He is a dormant killing machine who lucked out, found ''the one'' and carved up a little world for himself out of blood and bone fragment. When his wife Helen (the timeless Bridget Moynahan) passes away from an unnamed disease, she has the delicacy to buy John a beagle puppy, so he doesn't have to grieve alone. Unfortunately, a run-in with a former business associate's son (Alfie Allen) ends up in an home invasion, carjacking and puppy murder, which confronts John Wick to the issue that his past life has been. He is faced with a choice: run away or erase his previous existence by the way of mass murder. Fortunately for us, Wick chooses the second option.
Don't fuck with a man's dog. Seriously, it'll be even worse if the man doesn't have any children. He'll feel the equivalent of maternal instinct towards his pet. It's a life form he's entirely responsible of, a source of pride and unconditional love he'll be most protective of. The premise of JOHN WICK might seem ludicrous (and it many ways it is, puppy murder is about the worst possible cliché), but the movie is so simple that it works here. John Wick is a man who uses murder as a primary form of communication, and the cold-blooded murder of his puppy not only triggers this reptilian instinct of scorched-earth revenge in him and in the spectator, but since it was a symbol of his wife's love, it needlessly plunges him into grief a second time. The empathy mechanisms it triggers are basic, but you end up feeling for the guy. Even if he's a cold-blooded murderer.
Totally justified.
JOHN WICK can be an idiosyncratic viewing experience, because it's not meant to be deep and dialogue lines are paper thin. Its most successful aspect is that it implements the narrative philosophy of a graphic novel without being gimmicky like SIN CITY, or Zack Snyder's endurance run of a WATCHMEN adaptation. The storyline of JOHN WICK flows from one well-studied frame to another like the boxes of a comic book. You know how there often are wordless pages in a graphic novel?
JOHN WICK thrives are reproducing that exhilarating feeling into his action scenes. That's why Keanu Reeves was hired to play in this movie, because directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch needed a graceful and agile action veteran instead of someone with a Shakespearean range like, let's say Matthew McConaughey.
JOHN WICK is a movie that understands its strengths and weaknesses. That said, I'm a little worried about JOHN WICK's legacy. It's playing in the major leagues of glorification and sexualization of violence, and I wouldn't be surprised if some lonely cuckoo erupted in his high school or his workplace wearing a black suit to shoot up the place because he thought John Wick looked rad doing so. We're going through troubled times and JOHN WICK is vulnerable to becoming inspiration for violent and alienated idiots. Otherwise, it's an inspired movie that used kinetic and instinctive storytelling in order to create an identity for itself.
It reminded me of THE CROW, stripped of the gothic themes (the visual story telling, choreographies, etc.). There just aren't movies that are so unapologetic about what they are trying to be, anymore. JOHN WICK isn't a philosophical experience, but it's a great time and it's going to be remembered.
