There is too much shooting and not enough character in (this first instalment of) John Wick, an action vehicle tailor-made for Keanu Reeves
USA
3.5*
Director:
Chad Stahelski
Screenwriter:
Derek Kolstad
Director of Photography:
Jonathan Sela
Running time: 100 minutes
Tarantino, by way of Star Trek, taught us that revenge is a dish best served cold. The ice-cold temperament of Keanu Reeves is therefore perfectly suited to a tale of revenge that produces an almost never-ending stream of corpses but is all the more chilling because of its main character’s utterly cool demeanour.
Jonathan “John” Wick (Keanu Reeves) used to be a bad man. Until five years ago, he did astonishingly successful work as a heavy – halfway through the film, someone reminds us, perhaps a tad euphemistically, that Wick used to be the guy you called to “beat people up” – and was an associate of one of the nastiest Russian mobsters in New York City, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist).
A few days after the death of Wick’s wife, a group of young Russians notice his 1969 Boss Mustang at a gas station; that evening, they beat him to within an inch of his life and take the car. By some crazy coincidence, one of the men is Tarasov’s son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), who has no idea yet what he is about to unleash. And we know that some bad things are on the way because his father the strongman goes silent.
Chad Stahelski (David Leitch performed co-director duties, but because of DGA rules, only one person can receive credit as director) reveals very few details about Wick’s past life, either working in the business or living with his now-late wife, whom we only see in flashbacks and in a prominent video on his mobile phone. This lack of information hinders our understanding of the character but it also makes him an enigma whose strength lies demonstrably in the number of people he can kill without breaking a sweat, or a nail.
The first shots of Wick at home show us he is living very comfortably, but we don’t know how this is possible, whether his wife knew anything about the way he used to make his money or whether he has a day job. When a policeman stops by late one night during an altercation, the scene between them is deliberately comical but will baffle the viewer on second thought, because we don’t have enough insight into his life to understand why the cop plays dumb on purpose, albeit much to our enjoyment.
Thankfully, it is Reeves in the role of Wick, and even when he becomes emotional, be it out of sadness or out of anger, his expressions are muted, which in this case is a very good thing. What is not a good thing, however, is the casting of his nemesis. While Michael Nyqvist is a fine actor in his native Swedish (he starred as Mikael Blomkvist in the original TV series adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), his English is terribly wooden, and he is done no favours by a screenplay that makes him recite dialogue that sounds like it is from more than a century ago. His Russian may very well be better than his English (I couldn’t tell), but the film would have been much better off with a different actor in the role.
The story of a man unwillingly drawn back into his former life in the underworld to avenge a more recent injustice may sound a bit like The History of Violence, but John Wick has nowhere near the same insight or sense of drama as Cronenberg’s stunning 2005 film. Instead, we just get a lot of gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones, often without even knowing anything about the victims.
If you like violence, you will love John Wick. There is little variety, as more than half of the living shuffle off their mortal coil with a shot to the head, and the story is terribly thin, but the film does remind us that Reeves has a place in the action film genre, and sometimes it needs him as much as he needs it.
