John Wick

Image credit: Wikipedia

The one-man war has been a popular action-movie subgenre since Bruce Willis said “yippee kay-ay motherfucker” and shoved Hans Gruber out of a skyscraper window. It then was revitalised in the 2010s with Liam Neeson kicking the butts and taking the names of the traffickers who abducted his daughter. Now it has been revitalised yet again with Keanu Reeves unleashing his inner-assassin on all who get on his bad side. Of course I’m talking about John Wick.

Having begun with the second movie, it made sense to go back and see where it all began. 

The film tells the refreshingly simple story of an ex-underworld assassin who leaves the life, marries, settles down, and then suffers the loss of his wife. With only a dog to help him through his grief, John gets pulled back into the web of his former life when a group of arrogant thugs break into his home, steal his car, and kill his dog. Now he’s out for revenge!

While the whole thugs-kill-dog-so-protagonist-goes-on-revenge-fuelled-manhunt seems slightly ridiculous as a narrative foundation for an action movie, it really works of John Wick. The story proves to be really refreshing because there’s no convoluted layers of plot misdirection or abundance of characters integral to the plot, simply an angry man out to get revenge. Simple and honest humour lies within the plot itself, like those ironic horror movies where the ‘villains’ end up being the victims.

Image credit: Slashfilm.com

Then we have this wondrous second layer of fresh and different fight sequences, another thing that sets John Wick aside from other films like it. While gunplay is the favoured means of combat in the film (with a few nifty punch-ups thrown in), all the fight scenes are incredibly precise and quite impressive, rather than mere shoot-shoot-boom-bang-reload-without-hitting-anything bouts of noise. It’s not often that one sees competent use of firearms in movies like this and I, for one, definitely appreciated it.

Though it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot going on in this film, John Wick proves to be a fresh and interesting revitalisation of the one-man war and pretty decent and memorable action movie.

Director: Chad Staheliski & David Leitch, 2014

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Dean Winters, Adrianne Palicki, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, and Willem Dafoe