When she dies suddenly, John Wick’s (Keanu Reeves) wife leaves him an adorable little puppy dog because, as she puts it in a letter to him, to go on living his life John needs something to love. Being the titular character in action movie John Wick rather than, say, John Cusack, he gets to spend about a day with the pup before it’s killed by a group of home invaders who want to steal his car. Of course, what they don’t know is that John Wick is actually a former assassin, and that he really loved that dog, you guys.
There’s a certain kind of action movie that I think we all really wanted to see in the mid-to-late 90s, and I’m not quite sure it was ever really made. Coming off the testosterone high of years of Schwarzenegger and Stallone joints, there was definitive video game style appeal to seeing a regular looking dude storm through various sets and locations, waving around his first amendment rights and destroying the lives of so many musclebound bad guys. I just can’t think of a ton of movies before Keanu Reeves’ turn in The Matrix that actually perfectly capitalized on the audience’s desire to see that. Maybe Bad Boys, but there are many ways that Will Smith is not like you or me and that much is evident pretty much from the moment you see him wearing a fitted sweater. Where Smith, or maybe Tom Cruise, ooze a kind of irreconcilably Hollywood version of the ‘regular guy with skills and abilities far beyond the norm’ trope, there’s something that makes Keanu stand out from both of those guys in a big way. For one thing, he’s a master at playing one kind of role: he’s always a mysterious guy who doesn’t say much, largely because he can’t fully communicate to the people around him his disconnect from a world he can’t fully explain.
While this is most obvious in something like The Matrix, where he’s a disillusioned hacker and corporate slave who is just beginning to see that the world he lives in is really a computer simulation created by evil robots, it also applies to pretty much everything else he’s ever made. In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Keanu is one half of a duo who everyone assumes are doomed no-nothings, but who are really destined to unite all of humankind in rock & roll utopia. If only they could just make others see the world the excellent way they do. In Speed, Keanu’s a master at diffusing bombs and taking out terrorists, but who struggles to communicate effectively with regular human beings. This leads to an insane trip down a highway in a bus that’s rigged to explode, making a pretty apt metaphor for his relationship with love interest Sandra Bullock. In A Scanner Darkly… well, you get the picture.
The thing about Keanu’s eternal role as The One is that it makes him perfect for the sort of movie John Wick wants to be. He’s a silent master assassin who everyone respects and believes in. To challenge him is hubris, because even though he doesn’t look the part, he is the most dangerous and powerful man in his field. When John Wick goes on the rampage for his target – the idiotic son of his former employer in the Russian mob – it’s with the complete confidence of a man who doesn’t need to actually tell anyone anywhere how he feels or what he’s up to. If he tried to, he couldn’t. But he can show you with guns and fighting. Lots and lots of guns and fighting. If you do know who he is and get what he wants, you’re likely to step out of the way anyway. This is perfectly exemplified in a scene where a local cop stops by John’s house to investigate a noise complaint during a shootout with a dozen trained assassins.
Saying any more would just spoil things, but that scene actually speaks to one of the two best things about John Wick the film. The first is that John himself is different from every Average Joe action man of the late 90s, in that everyone in the world of the film already knows what a threat he is. It’s no surprise that he can survive as long as he can, or that he’s going to succeed at his goal, and no one acts like it is. Even the father of his target spends the first couple minutes of his appearance just contentedly sitting in front of his fireplace, drinking and singing about how John is totally “Baba Yaga”, which is kind of like “The Boogeyman”. The second great thing about the film is the world in which John and the other assassins and mobsters exist. Rather than the traditional idea of an underworld that operates in and around the real world, John Wick‘s version of the criminal underworld is a hyper-real and hyper-stylized environment that almost reminds me of something out of Sin City or, I suppose, The Matrix. The assassins have their own secret codes and rituals, their own currency, their own bars and their own hotels. They stick relatively closely to arcane codes of honor that are also immediately recognizable and understandable to the audience, and that establish this world as a unique place that you’d want to occupy. The look and feel of this world is by far the best and most original aspect of John Wick. Seeing Keanu navigate it is almost as fun as the first time he went raving in The Matrix.
If the movie has any failings at all, it’s that the dialogue scenes holding all the amazingly choreographed action beats together are mostly pretty thin. And while at first they do a hilarious job of establishing how much of a threat John actually is, later ones begin to err on the side of incredible seriousness, purely to mount up the sense of tension that really isn’t reasonable considering we’re well aware John can defeat any threat he’s faced with. It does all feel worth it by the time Keanu has invented a new form of murder that involves driving a car and shooting at people who are running around him all at the same time though.
Ultimately this movie is the perfect expression of action movie insanity, with the focus primarily on action sequences that feel both unique and exquisite. It is a Keanu Reeves film in all the best senses of that word. Even if you hate it all the way through, and if you do you’re likely taking it too seriously, you’ll leave knowing one thing for sure: John Wick really loved that damn dog.
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The world’s deadliest assassin sets out to murder everyone ever in a hyper-stylized and amazingly well choreographed action movie. All because some random hoodlum killed his dog. It’s as good as it sounds.
