Non stop monotony--beautifully filmed but a linear plot

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2014)

John Wick (2014)
I thought the weak point of this movie would be Keanu Reeves, since he's not the best actor in town. But instead it was the monotony of the killing, on and on, all at the same pace, with hardly a break.
I'm not complaining about violence here—that's what this kind of revenge movie is all about. Reeves plays a guy who used to be a trained assassin, one of the best, and he has to come out of retirement (you'll see why in the first ten minutes). And he is now after some of the people he once worked for, so they are formidable foes, and cruel.
But that's about it. The process of getting even takes up the rest of the movie, and there are the necessary clubs and warehouses, the muscle car antics and the flipping and diving while shooting your guns with perfect accuracy. Mostly there is just shooting and fighting and fighting and shooting.
So, how to make a movie that has this one-liner idea work? With psychology, cleverness, surprise, and even failure sometimes. You won't see any of that here. You also won't see humor. By luck, the preview for my showing (in a theater) was "Die Hard," and what a reminder of a terrific action movie, where one guy has to kill a whole slew of enemies. But there it's funny, there are constant twists and turns, and you actually care about the hero.
That's another problem here: you care about Mr. Wick because he was wronged at the start, but he's not a sympathetic person. You just don't really worry about him. I suppose you know he won't die right away, so you are "on his side" more or less, but not with much investment. In a weird way, some of the villains were more compelling than Wick—the main bad guy is a terrific Michael Nyqvist (who is always really good), and Willem Dafoe plays a terrific small, key part.
I might have left a movie this straight forward if it weren't for one thing—it's photographed well. The camera, light, and generally the editing, are all elegant and almost pretty, in a good way. The sets are filmed in a logical way that moves you through the spaces through the eye of the camera with confidence and dark beauty. Good stuff, and it had my eyes glued.
Now give the thing something more and glue the rest of me.