They stole his car; they killed his dog; now they are going to pay

Rating: 8/10 (24 July 2016)

John Wick's life is not going well; his wife of five years has recently died and he is barely holding things together. Then he receives one final gift from his wife; a puppy. It looks as if this is just what he needed to pull himself together but soon afterwards a group of young punks break into his house and attack him while looking for the keys to his classic car they also kill the puppy. They also had no idea who they were messing with until Wick met his wife he was the top assassin working for a Russian mobster in New York. The thief's father is that same Russian gangster and if he is to save his son he will have to kill Wick first. The killers sent after Wick are soon dispatched and now he is on the warpath; everybody who gets in his way is going to end up dead and a lot of people get in his way.
If you are looking for a deep and meaningful story or even a sense of mystery you are likely to be disappointed with this; from the start we know who the bad guys are and we just know that before the film is over our protagonist will have killed them all along with countless heavies. If you want lots of action that feels real without obvious CGI, wirework, obviously choreographed fights and corny one-liners then this is just the thing. With its almost nonstop violent action it feels more like something John Woo would have made in his Hong Kong days than a typical Hollywood action movie. Keanu Reeves does an impressive job as Wick. Michael Nyqvist make a good bad guy and Alfie Allen is suitably unpleasant as his dog-killing son. They are also enjoyable turns from the likes of Willem Dafoe and Ian McShane. My only real complaint about the film is that the subtitles that appeared when anybody spoke Russian were tiny and not at the bottom of the screen so that they weren't that easy to read before they vanished; that wasn't a major problem as this film is about action not dialogue. Overall I'd recommend this to anybody after a proper action movie.