Keanu Reeves was already an internet darling before his silver screen renaissance. Reeves had become a mainstay in internet memes since about 2010, and though he may be most active in people's lives currently with the all out cluster fuck release of Cyberpunk 2077, what eventually lead him to being in the most anticipated game of all time was the little action movie that could John Wick. When it comes to action films, I'll be the first to admit that I am incredibly picky. Movies with people full of guns are rarely interesting to me unless they are something like the original Die Hard, James Bond, or something more operatic like Star Wars. Because of this, I did not see John Wick when it was released, though that hardly stopped people from recommending it to me left and right for the last six years. Well, today is your lucky day those who annoyed me, because being knee-deep into Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten me in the mood.
The praise for John Wick was not for its plot, tension, or characters - hell, part of the selling point was the absolute absence of these things. John Wick is an action movie stripped down to the very core of what we go to see action movies for. It is a ballistic ballet, one with as little pretense as is required. The plot is simple enough, but effective in its simplicity. The titular John's wife died of an unnamed illness, and just before she died she made arrangements to gift him a puppy so he would not need to grieve alone. It takes all of two days before a group of Russian gangsters break into his house to steal his car, killing his dog for the kicks of it. This group, it turns out, was lead by the son of the gang's leader, a former employer of Wick's who knows full well that not only is Wick capable of killing every last one of them for such an indiscretion, but also that he is virtually impossible to stop once he gets going. What follows is something inevitable, a force of nature that drops as many bodies as there are years in a man's life.
John Wick operates in inverse of what one would traditionally say is good story telling. The tension isn't in whether John is going to be able to get revenge in one piece, but rather how many people he is going to have to kill before he does. We are apart of the most media saturated generation by a long shot, and as such we have seen just about every story possible multiple times over. That is to say, we don't need to see it again. Post modernism tried very hard to predict this sort of audience member, but even in its most radical predictions it fell short. Boredom and deconstruction where the right themes and traits for post modernism to discuss in predicting our current future, but what it left out was the subtle way in which boredom and deconstruction would twist our wants in media. All we need is the intention, the reason, the send-off from placid to chaos, and so long as that is sold right, you can be as quick and simple with it as you want. It's one reason why critics decried whole-film origin stories for superhero films. It's why John Wick comes preloaded with an obvious back story that is felt that we can almost tell ourselves without having to have any character give an exposition dump. We know it already, all we need is the fireworks.
This may sound, especially to an older generation, that people and things are getting dumber, but the ironic thing is it means precisely the opposite. One can consider that John Wick is a movie that sloppily chops off the dramatic context to the violence on screen, but you'd be missing the point. Dramatic context, when used effectively, can make a good movie great, but more often than not dramatic context is simply an excuse to enjoy what we came here for. It allows the fantasy to play out without the audience to feel stupid for being entertained by vapidity. This itself is stupid, and John Wick knows it. The dramatic context of, say, Die Hard, is virtually unnecessary. Who cares if his wife is locked away in the tower? It hardly motivates any of the tension or action that happens in the film. That's all John McClane, baby. What it did was allow those who were less accepting of the fantasy of it all feel that they could retain some of their intellectual integrity while watching a popcorn film. In the modern age, we don't give a shit about that. What matters is that entertainment is done well, with skill and mainline to the audiences emotions, while still giving us something worth marveling at after the credits close. John Wick, as I said before, is a ballet. It is a series of precisely choreographed, skillfully shot, and invigoratingly staged action scenes meant to play on our enjoyment of not just chaos, but on the expression of what John Wick is. He is a force of nature, and we want to watch that in all of its glory and horror.
Naturally, that means the film is with only minimal substance, but that is hardly any matter. The color control on this film is very well done, nearing (although not quite achieving) the mastery of filmmakers like Nicholas Winding Refn and David Fincher. The choreography is ready to be studied in schools for this sort of thing, and best of all it is a thrill ride from beginning to end, full of great set pieces, appropriate humor, and a general tone of fun-over-drama. This film wants you to enjoy going to the movies again and feel no guilt about whether it was quality enough to share with your friends, or if its subjects were tackled appropriately. And goddamn, yeah I did.
7.5
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