"John Wick": review

When it comes to Keanu Reeves's new actioner, "John Wick," I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is that the script is lame; the story is predictable 1980s-era boilerplate; the dialogue is painfully corny; the implausibilities pile onto each other like randy rugby players; the music is often annoyingly intrusive; and Mr. Reeves once again finds himself surrounded by superior actors—Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane, and John Leguizamo to name three. Reeves won't be winning any Oscars for his latest outing, although he emotes more intensely in this movie than in any other Reeves vehicle I've watched: he gets a crying scene, and he gets a screaming scene. Michael Nyqvist (you may remember him as the antagonist in "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol") is the scenery-chewing main bad guy here: a Russian mafia boss whose son beats Wick up and kills Wick's dog—a gift from Wick's wife who had died just a few days previous. So the plot is a simple one: John Wick, a former killer who enjoyed life as a normal nobody for a short while, finds himself back in the game and out for revenge. And that's really it: the movie makes no bones about its purpose, which is to tell you the story of a pissed-off professional killer.

The good news is that the gunplay and fight choreography might just be the movie's saving grace. When John Wick shoots someone, he almost never shoots that person only once: oh, no, Precious. If you're unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of John Wick's blazing firearms, you can expect to get at least two bullets in your chest and another two in your head. In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the gunfight choreography in "John Wick" is that a head shot doesn't necessarily kill the bad guy, which means that Wick often has to shoot the bad guy in the head again to put him down.

Despite the interesting fight scenes, the film felt like a poor attempt at recapturing the intensity of "Jack Reacher" (reviewed here). Unfortunately, Reeves simply doesn't have the acting chops to pull off a smolder the way Tom Cruise can do it. I was taken aback to see, on Wikipedia, that critics—including the normally crotchety Peter Travers of Rolling Stone—have heaped praise on this movie, hailing Keanu Reeves's "return to form." I'll grant that I find Reeves to be an amazing physical actor (he did fantastic work in the Matrix films), and in a movie like this, the script is tailor-made to play to his assets: his character is a man of few words and relentless focus, which allows Reeves to pass off his natural woodenness as a sort of intensity. But was all of this enough to garner such wide critical praise? In my opinion: no.

So I hate to say it, but I can't really recommend "John Wick." It's got some delicious ass-kicking in it, but it's nothing I haven't seen Jack Bauer or Jack Reacher do before. There's another ass-kicking movie coming out in Korea soon: "The Equalizer," starring Denzel Washington. I'll be curious to see how that film stacks up against "John Wick." At a guess, it'll win easily. Because Denzel can act.


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