Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Movie Review - John Wick


Between personal reasons and being a little burned out I took a break from the blog for awhile, but now I'm back to rave about a little film I saw called John Wick, and why you should see it.

John Wick on paper looks questionable. The plot? A retired hitman comes back for one more job after some dumb criminals kill his dog and steal his car. The writer? A guy who's written two mediocre-to-bad films that were released in 2012. The directors? Two veteran stunt coordinators with no previous directing credits. This movie on paper looks like something Nicolas Cage would be in to earn a couple hundred bucks and would go straight to DVD. In actuality though, this film works as an excellent B movie that is surely going to help revitalize the career of Keanu Reeves, and maybe make him the action hero he always wanted to be.

As far as the plot is concerned, I've already given out the majority of information you need to know about John Wick. Wick is a retired Hitman, who left the life for a woman. In those years, she falls ill to some kind of sickness and dies. After she dies, Wick gets one last gift from her, a puppy delivered to his doorstep to encourage him to keep on living. However, some criminals break into his house, steal his classic car and kill the puppy. When Wick comes to, he vows to track down and kill everyone responsible for these heinous deeds, and he will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger. The rest of the film follows Wick as he stalks and kills the bad guys and how he traverses the criminal underworld.

The movie is shot wonderfully, has a great soundtrack and delightful stunts. The gun play and stunts are exactly something I would expect of two directors who have worked on some of the biggest action films of the last couple decades. The writing isn't spectacular, but it never needed to be. This film is a classic B-movie shoot ém up, in the vein of Taken, Hard Boiled, Die Hard, Dredd, and of course the film Shoot Ém Up. The movie is less about the story than it is about cool ways Keanu Reeves can kill people, but it's solid and plenty for what it needs. John Wick looks excellent and has a playfulness about it in the way it was shot, they went into this knowing exactly the film they were making. They even have a little flair to the Russian subtitles the film uses. The score was well done for the movie, though I admit a lot of it sounded similar to each other, it worked to set a general tone for the film.

While the story isn't amazing, the world-building involved in creating the criminal underworld is fantastic and fascinating, getting an appearance from The Wire's Lance Reddick as the front desk attendant of a criminal hotel and Ian Mcshane as some sort of big shot in the Hotel. I could watch a whole movie just about the goings-on with this hotel and the people within, it's totally engrossing and fun to watch. The acting throughout this movie is sold as well, with solid turns from Adrianne Palicki, Lance Reddick, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane, even Willem Dafoe and Dean Winters doing good work here. The star of the show however really is Keanu Reeves, and the acclaim is deserved. In the past he's gotten a lot of flack for his acting, being called wooden or cold, but where elsewhere that would be a detractor, having Reeves be a detached, calm and collected killer in this film plays right to his strengths and he excels in it. He delivers just the right amount of emotion to make the character believable, and plays it with enough cheese to let you know he knows what film they're making. The creators of this film weren't looking to make an Oscar-winning piece of cinematic gold, they were looking to make a kick-ass movie about a guy killing people in different brutal and visually pleasing ways while getting to crack a joke or two along the way.

Without giving too much more away, I gotta say right now as a fan of this genre of film that John Wick is an instant classic and I can't wait to make it a part of my collection. Go see it now and enjoy the ride that is John Wick.



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