The last Keanu Reeves movie I'd seen before John Wick was Man of Tai Chi, which I loved, so I was reasonably optimistic going in to this one.
First of all, let me address casting. There were a great many actors in this movie who I am very fond of but many of whom I feel are under-appreciated: John Leguizamo (I love this guy!), Willem Dafoe (probably my favourite actor for playing a villain), Bridget Regan, Lance Reddick, Adrianne Palicki, Dean Winters, and Daniel Bernardt to name a few. Special mention goes to a short but enjoyable performance by Kevin Nash; I forgot how big that guy was! I enjoyed seeing them all here, although sadly most of them had only minor roles - even Willem Dafoe had surprisingly little actual screen time. Still, each of them put in a great performance and was enjoyable on-screen.
Michael Nyqvist's performance as the main villain impressed me at times, though there were occasions when I think going a little more over-the-top might have better suited the film. Still, there were certainly moment that endeared the character to me, which is more than I can say about many movie villains.
Keanu Reeves himself actually puts in one of his better performances here. Yes, he plays much of it in his standard "strong and silent" mode (which I have no problem with), but there's moments where the character's emotions come through, and I thought he handled them well.
Of course it's Keanu's physical performance that really shines in the film. Because where John Wick really stands out is in it's excellent action. Smart, hard-hitting and extremely well choreographed and shot yet acted out with just a touch of roughness that actually added to the realism, the is exactly the kind of action movie that I love. Both the gunfights and the fistfights are miles ahead of most of what Hollywood puts out. Despite being the action being fast and intense, I could still see and understand pretty much everything that happened on-screen, even in the darker scenes such as the club shootout. That's impressive.
Let's not forget that the brilliance of the action is in no small part thanks to the fantastic choreography and cinematography. The camera work and editing do a great job of showing off how John delivers death with confidence and skill, and the world he inhabits is a stylish blend of the old and the new, of upscale hotels with old-world charm, colourful neon-drenched nighclubs, gothic churches, and rain-drenched dockyards.
In a movie like this you might not expect too much from the story. And on the surface, the story of John Wick doesn't have too much to it, initially coming across as a simple and straightforwards tale of revenge. At least that was my own first impression. But there was one scene in the film that bothered me a little bit, and as I contemplated that scene I came to realise that this film had more depth than I originally thought. Though a little subtle perhaps, John Wick is a story of how we deal with grief, of how hard it is to change, and how easy it is to slip back into destructive habits when we are in pain. Well, that's my read anyway, and in my eyes that elevates the movie beyond a simple action movie.
Overall I'm giving John Wick an 8/10: a fantastic and stylish action movie with just a little bit more depth than you might have expected. Fortunately it seems other action movies have started to take notes from John Wick, hopefully we will eventually be rid of the plague of the "quick-cut shaky-cam". It can't happen quickly enough if you ask me.
#####SPOILER WARNING#####
While the film initially seems to be driven by Wick's desire for revenge against Iosef, the actual kill is not the climax of the movie. This is the scene that I mentioned bothered me a little, because it seemed to be given very little importance: John doesn't say anything before or after, he barely even looks as Iosef as he kills him, and doesn't seem to register any satisfaction when the deed is finally done. He barely even waits for the body to hit the ground before walking away.
That's because John didn't really care about Iosef. He was never after revenge, not really. John was always a killer; he left that life behind for his wife's sake, but it was still a part of him. Suffering after his wife's death, the dog was something to hold on to, a way to remember and feel close to her, but when even that was taken away from him he was left with no way to handle the immense grief and pain that was overwhelming him. So he reverted back to old habits: he decided on a goal and threw himself into it, focussing on it as a way to avoid thinking about what was really hurting him. Killing Iosef was his goal, but he didn't gain any pleasure from it. Quite the opposite, with Iosef dead John no longer had anything to keep him busy, to distract him from the pain.
I think that was a brilliant bit of character work and a subtle subversion of the standard revenge trope.
I personally found the final battle with Viggo a bit anticlimactic. Viggo had earlier traded his son's life to save his own, but it seems he later regretted it and deliberately antagonized John into killing him. He didn't try to set a trap for John, he didn't wait until he was safe before calling John with news of Marcus' death, he deliberately did things in a way that would most likely end with his own death. Suicide-by-Wick as it were. It was interesting and tied into the theme of grief, but John fighting one out-of-shape old man was not really the most satisfying climax to such an intense action film.
Something about the way John adopted a dog at the end felt a bit off for me. He didn't stumble onto a dog and decide to adopt him, he didn't pick a dog that reminded him of Daisy, he just walked into a pound and picked a dog at random (as far as we could tell anyway), as though one dog was as good as another. Perhaps that was deliberate? Perhaps the idea was less to inform us that John was going to heal, to be OK, and more to say that he still didn't know what to do with himself and figured he would try the dog thing again out of desperation more than anything else? Is this not actually a happy ending, but a nihilistic one? I find that rather interesting to think about, if not perhaps the most satisfying way to end the movie.
