aka "My name is John Wick... you killed my dog... prepare to die."

Rating: 7/10 (30 April 2016)

I read a Todd Solondz quote once (yeah, weird way to start a review for John Wick but stick with me, folks), where he was talking about his movie Happiness and how it's actually quite simple to gain sympathy from an audience, and he talked about how the writer can just give a character cancer and everyone will feel sorry for that person and if you make someone a victim (and he/she's not right off the bat the villain or something) then there's identification right away. At the start of this movie we don't know who this man John Wick exactly is or what he does or how he can afford such a good house and car, but we do know that he has just lost his wife to some sickness and that she left him as a parting gift a dog so that he could move on with his life. And not any old dog or some mangy thing from the vet, but the cutest goddamn puppy that you could ever lay your eyes on. Needless to say things look good... until Wick happens to stop at a gas station, a Russian s***-head talks some crap (good ol' 'Reek' from Game of Thrones Alfie Allen, who is another good s***-head here), then that night the mobsters come to his house, trash it, beat him up and, worst of all, kill the dog.
The writers go for a premise that's fairly easy and borderline lazy; of course we want to see Wick get the payback on these guys - even as they were once his former employers and ironically, in order to really retire, he had to pull a number that set up the Russian mobster's empire in cozy terms - because they killed the pretty-witty-wicky dog! As the Dude would say in Big Lebowski, this aggression will not stand! What ensues from here is a whole lot of violence and carnage, peppered with a whole lot of good character actors and awesome people - Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane, Dean Winters, Adrienne Palikci, Lance Reddick (remember him from The Wire and Oz?) - and that's about it. In that way it's admirable as a kind of meat-n-potatoes flick for the guys (and maybe some girls out there too): watch Keanu Reeves kill a LOT of people.
But there are two things that I didn't expect out of what is basically a gigantic action kill-fest that is a time-waster: 1) the fight and stunt choreography, and how the director and cameraman and editor get it all together, works with some tight and efficient work while also being complex at the same time. You can tell where everyone is in relation to one another whether it's Keanu and a dozen guys on a club floor, or just him and Palicki getting dirty (not *that* dirty, the fighting kind) in a hotel room, or three cars in a high speed chase. It's not chaotic but it is intense work and I got more drawn in to it than I expected.
The 2) is that there's a whole lot of good background to this world that Wick is in. What I mean is that it almost resembles something out of a comic book (for adults) in a good way: it's like there's this whole set up functionality for someone like Wick to work in, to the point of almost (or simply being) satirical. I had a big laugh at one moment when a cop (just one) comes to Wick's place after he guns down a whole bunch of guys at night, they know each other apparently and he sees a dead guy on the floor behind him, and he just gives him a 'have a good night' and walks away. Then the cleaning crew comes (what do they do when they're *not* cleaning up, or maybe there's always work to be done as far as disposing of bodies in this New York), and then there's the hotel that Wick stays at while he looks for Josef, and it's run like a hotel *for* the criminal element, as if they are always expecting guys with guns to be in their midst and only as that, maybe, they keep it down a little.
This is a heightened reality as opposed to something fully realistic, but this added to my pleasure watching the movie. I wanted to see a whole movie set in this world that McShane's character seems to run - like some old film-noir he sits in a jazz club (lit very prettily, this is a colorful movie for big chunks) - and that Reddick is the concierge I suppose. The problem though is that underneath all of this style and potential for a much grander experience it's still a shallow action movie. In a way it may work for this kind of material that it's simply "you stole my car, you killed my dog, and my wife..."; for an audience coming to this, maybe too much ambiguity would muddy the waters. But I wish the filmmakers, who are clever enough to put in the touches of a much larger environment for these criminals (Dafoe has a good if predictable role also as a hit-man by the way), had gone a little further.
As it stands I liked it, though by a certain point - like say in the last twenty minutes - it starts to get into overkill territory. I was still into it for the action and would recommend it simply on those terms. But if you're looking for something challenging as far as engaging/challenging and audience's sympathies, you won't get it. This is all about Reeves punching, kicking, slamming, knifing, blasting, crashing, shooting, choking, and doing everything under the sun, and while he's not Neo here he might as well be.