63 | 3 stars | B
Director: Chad Stahelski, David Leitch
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
Synopsis: John Wick, an ex-hitman, is forced back into the game in pursuit of personal vengeance.
Genre: Action
Key awards: IGN Summer Movie Awards – Best Action Movie
Runtime: 101 minutes
Language: English
Singapore rating: NC16 (violence and coarse language)
This was actually rather enjoyable. Having recently seen Guillermo del Toro’s colossal misfire – the 2013 Pacific Rim – I had feared the worst from this purportedly wacky and almost self-aware debut from both Stahelski and Leitch. What if this was no more than a smarmy, over-lit imitation of film neo-noir, or what if it took its carefree attitude to stir together with careful character pieces, like the Driver in Drive (2011), or Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)?
John Wick quickly reassures us that this is not the case. We open with what appears to be a dying John, clutching a painful stomach wound, stopping to look at a video memento of him and his wife. The titles appear. We see John in a less traumatic environment – his own home – reminiscing. We learn that his wife had passed from illness, and that John now leads a routine life, albeit in a huge, ultra-modern abode. The flashbacks are efficient and effective; they linger little, and are given only to provide us with the background information necessary to follow what is to come. Already, this proves a refresher from the convention of saturated blockbusters hell-bent on stuffing the viewer with globe-trotting scenes of exotica, mission-control tensions, the kinky seduction by the protagonist of his lady, and so on.
So it follows that a film with guns and Keanu Reeves must feature some kind of conflict, and where better to stir up a fight than at a petrol station, between Reeves and a cocky, hot-headed Russian gangster? I do not mean this as a criticism; in fact, the film shines precisely through this set-up, because it dispenses with all the conventions of national secrets or international crises in order to escalate things. Wick drives a 1969 Ford Mustang, and Iosef (Alfie Allen), the gangster, somehow believes he can simply buy his car on the spot. Wick rejects the offer, and Iosef just has to mutter, in native Russian, “Everything’s got a price, bitch.” It misfires, because Wick – unbeknownst to him – used to be an associate of his father, and coolly replies in Russian, “not this bitch”.
The Russians do not take kindly to being snubbed, and they follow Wick home where they catch him by surprise, beat him savagely, and (I’ll leave the details to your own viewing) anger him enough to dig into his buried past for the sake of revenge. John Wick, as Iosef’s father Viggo (Michael Nyqvist) points out to him, was the Baba Yaga of their syndicate, referring to the Boogeyman of Slavic folklore. Clearly, the syndicate is in grave danger. Viggo hires hitmen to eliminate the threat, and when that fails, puts a bounty on Wick himself. The rest is a compilation of yummy violence, excursions into underworld nightlife, and quite a handful of side criminal profiles.
This is a spoiler-free review, because I personally think that analysis of this film doesn’t really require much knowledge of plot details. John Wick, right from the start, sets the viewer on alert because it divulges sparingly and leaves us with the bare essentials, wanting for more. It builds up the character’s life slowly, before taking that all apart in his confrontation with Iosef. At his wife’s funeral, Wick is approached by an old friend, Marcus (Willem Dafoe), who later is tasked by Viggo to assassinate him. After the botched attempt by Viggo’s henchmen, Wick dials a number asking for “a dinner reservation for twelve”. Minutes later, a cleaning agency arrives at his doorstep to help him dispose of the bodies.
There is a rhythm to the film, expressed through patterns of behaviour recurrent in its characters, that we are not entirely familiar with but soon get accustomed to. These are codes shared among the underworld elite – at the Continental hotel where John later stays, “business”, meaning killing, is prohibited. Special coins are exchanged for favours, bribes, and an entrance to the literal underground basement of partying and drinking, coveted as a haven amidst hell. Having this rhythm greatly enhances the film’s charm, because its narratives, while sometimes far-fetched and heavily romanticised (the thug life having this sacred, otherworldly fashion to it), are made intriguing and un-formulaic, and its stakes greater and higher.
Here is where John Wick falters. Soon after most of the characters recognise that killing John Wick requires more than a Thursday-night gun party and necessitates that they place their own lives on the line, the film tails off into conventional territory, making few inroads with regard to Wick’s inner mobility or the complexity of mob relations. Some double-crossing ensues, but not enough to rescue it from the depths of generic scriptwriting. Lots of gunshots follow; at least a good forty were fired in one scene alone. Agents fall like flies, and Wick escapes almost unscathed, miraculously. Maybe he really is the Baba Yaga. But a Boogeyman should either be a symbolic entity unfazed by human suffering – see Chang in Only God Forgives (2013) – or a flawed human forced to carry this infamous persona. John Wick is neither; he is symbolic only in his unparalleled fighting skills, and human only in his vengeance. There is little about his character or the possibility of failure – resembling a sleeker, modern-day James Bond.
With increasing time, the story thus becomes something of a bore. Violence is not yet at its sadistic, hyperrealistic climax, but its occurrences are numerous and do suggest a directorial desire to fit the setting checklist: a dance floor, a rundown safe house, a pier, a church etc. Unlike Drive, where director Refn’s goal of constructing an intimate character study of solitude is complemented by curated bursts of brutality, John Wick’s experimentation with the gangster-revenge trope sadly trips over itself. The film’s ending redeems itself somewhat, but does not leave us with the gleeful adrenaline of, say, Leitch’s third feature Deadpool 2 (2018), or a satisfactory denouement of an intimate character portrait such as the one cultivated in Paterson (2016) (the ending shot of Reeves has stylistic similarities with Jim Jarmusch’s Adam Driver).
Yet, for all its shortcomings, John Wick really manages to entertain both the casual and calculated viewer; the bloodshed satisfies both, and the absence of stuffy spy-trope bombardment would please the latter. There is something about violence that the film tells us: yes, mess with the wrong man, and you’re finished, but also that aggression and escalation can come from innocuous settings, may stem from personal grief, and would always progress at the hands of proud and hot-headed amateurs. It is somewhat of a pity that John Wick does not end on this note.
Trailer: