Official Website

Directors: David Leitch, Chad Stahelski

Writer: Derek Kolstad

Runtime: 101 min

Main Cast:

• Keanu Reeves as John Wick
• Michael Nyqvist as Viggo Tarasov
• Alfie Allen as Iosef Tarasov
• Willem Dafoe as Marcus
• Adrianne Palicki as Ms. Perkins
• John Leguizamo as Aureilo
• Ian McShane as Winston

Review: by The Superior Spider-Sam

Bullets to the head and awesome looking gunfights. That trailer alone made me want to watch John Wick, despite Keanu “No Emotion” Reeves starring in it.

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BULLETS TO THE HEAD!

What I Liked:

Man oh man, this movie’s choreography is clearly the best thing about it. It is a glorious 140 minutes of headshots from 6 inches away. That may sound gruesome (because it is), but the movie does an excellent job of showing the impact of the headshot without going overboard in the bloodiness.

John Wick is at its best when a fast-paced gun fight is on screen where the title character is taking out mobsters by the dozens, breaking arms, and pulling off close-up head shots – which happens a lot. I can’t say it enough. The gunfights are incredible.

Now that I’ve gotten that out, let me go back and talk about the actual plot of this film. It is a basic revenge film just as the trailer shows. No surprises.

A Russian mobster (played by Alfie Allen a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ Theon Greyjoy) decides he wants a ’69 Mustang that he sees at a gas station, so he breaks into the owner’s home with a few buddies to catch him off guard and steals it. In the process, he kills the owner’s dog and leaves its body in front of him. What the mobster doesn’t know – and what his father Viggo (Michael Nyqvist) violently teaches him – is that the car and dog belong to John Wick, a former assassin of that very same Russian mob whose deeds laid the foundation for the mob as it is today.

Knowing the dog (which had been given to Wick by his dead wife) was important and that John Wick will be coming for his stupid son, Viggo puts a bounty on Wick’s head to stop him by calling all the killers he knows to do the job. Spoiler alert: it’s not enough.

This is another reason the movie succeeds. It knows what it is and does not deviate. It does not try to be what it is not, unlike a certain film about car racing that turned into ordinary people defying the laws of physics and gravity (Fast Five).

John Wick is quick and straight to the point with virtually no meaningless scenes trying to get us to care about something irrelevant, nor any attempts at unfunny comic relief or anything else that usually dooms movies like this. You’re in, you see the revenge, and you’re out. Simple as that.

One last thing that was really enjoyable was the fact that this film created its own little world. All of the assassins, Wick included, seemed to belong to an exclusive part of society complete with its own kind of currency for bartering. There is also a hotel for assassins that has rules specifically for them (such as no killing), and breaking these rules is not something even they would want to attempt. I thought this secret assassin ‘”world within a world” was really neat.

Also, Willem Dafoe is in it!

What I Didn’t Like:

Pacific Rim, Fast and Furious, Transformers, John Wick – what do these movies all have in common? They aren’t plot heavy. I don’t feel this detracts all that much from John Wick (like it did during the three-hour Transformer movie), but it is worth noting that this isn’t a movie you want to turn your brain on for. You saw the entire thing in the trailer, so watching it will just give you a longer version.

Keanu Reeves recently said that he isn’t offered any big roles all that much anymore, and for good reason. He can not act. Again, this movie was perfect for him because the plot (or lack thereof) really didn’t call for superior acting skills, but it was noticeable how his face just does not change! One of the reasons I wanted to watch this was because I thought I saw him show anger and I was interested. He does show anger, but I didn’t really buy it. This may be because I noticed that in one scene when he was yelling, his angry face looked a lot like his drunk face which was remarkable similar to his sad face which looked exactly like his calm face…and so on.

Again, because of what the movie is, it’s not the biggest deal.

Images Courtesy of IMDB