Poor Man’s Mad Max: Fury Road: both movies strive for the beauty of simplicity, but John Wick falls a little short
★★★☆☆
John Wick is the 2014 action vehicle starring Keanu Reeves. The film follows an incredibly simple trajectory, which is usually a winning combination for me (more on that later): Keanu’s wife dies. He is heartbroken. Two days later, a dog arrives with a letter from his dead wife telling him that it’s her final gift so he doesn’t need to grieve alone. Then, Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) shows up and… uh… you know what never mind. It’s not important. He pisses Keanu off. Which is a bad thing to do, because it turns out that he is a legendary badass ex-mafia-hitman demigod.
The rest of the movie plays out like a video game. Keanu works his way through increasingly tougher enemies in pursuit of Alfie Allen (who is the mafia boss’s son). Lots of pretty decent action sequences take place under a blue filter. If you enjoy action movies, you’re going to have a good time watching this. I wish I loved this movie more than I did, but it just didn’t transcend the action movie it was.
I believe action movies have two paths to becoming five stars. One way is to add to or reach outside the genre and try to become something more than an action movie. Usually this is extending into other genres and trying to have a better reason that drives the action. In Edge of Tomorrow, our main character is a coward and the sci-fi conceit was new and refreshing. Robocop adds a metric ton of political satire into the mix. The other path an action movie can take is to simplify everything. Die Hard, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Raid all take this approach. They have incredibly straightforward storylines and very obvious stakes. The canyon between these two paths is littered with Fast and Furious sequels and every bad Bond movie. Sadly, I had high hopes that John Wick would find itself outside of the mediocrity-canyon, but that wasn’t my experience.
John Wick does some things incredibly well. The world in which the movie is set is incredibly fascinating. The criminal element in the movie has a whole set of bylaws and customs that are casually dropped throughout the story without any clumsy exposition. There is an upscale hotel that serves as a safe space for hitman — a home base where no killing can take place. There is a crew of cleaners ready at any hour of the day — an uber for dead people, if you will. They even have their own currency. First-time directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski do an excellent job of world-building, but then in the home stretch they abuse their creation to wrap up loose ends. Both directors are former stunt coordinators, and that helps to explain all the great and all the bad in this movie.
Next week, David will review Sleepwalk with Me, Mike Birbiglia’s film adaptation of his one man show. I really like Birbiglia and his sleepwalking story rather he’s telling it in standup, podcast, one-man-show, or movie form. I wanted to expose David a little to his story and his movie.
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