Ridiculous action movie trying to be serious

Rating: 5/10 (16 October 2016)

I could talk for a long time about weak writing, one-dimensional characters and stupid and boring action scenes, but these are the things that simply make this movie bad. What makes it truly ridiculous, however, is its portrayal of Russians and Russian mafia.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind Russians portrayed as bad guys, it's just one of many action movie clichés that I easily accept. The ridiculous part is, this movie actually tries to focus on Russians while knowing NOTHING about them.
First, let's take John Wick, who is supposed to be a badass hit-man. The mafia calls him Baba Yaga. This fact alone is so hilarious it would send a Russian roll on the floor laughing, because it sounds about as good as calling a badass hit-man "the Wicked Witch of the East". Baga Yaga is a folk character mostly known through fairy- tales, she's an old witch who is portrayed as wise, scary and occasionally villainous, but quite often helpful (and she's mostly known from fairy-tales where she's practically never a big villain). "Baba" isn't really a part of the name, it simply means "old hag". That's right, a badass hit-man called "old hag" and a female name.
I assume at some point there was an idea to find a word similar to Boogeyman and use it as a nickname for John. There indeed is a Slavic "boogeyman" called Babay which they perhaps confused with Baba Yaga. Boy, how many laughs this confusion produced.
Naturally, not a single character in the movie can speak Russian at all. Plus almost nobody has a real Russian name. I understand that Americans tend to struggle very hard with Russian surnames, but first names? There are no Russians named Iosef, let alone Viggo! The mafia boss looks about as realistic as Boris in Snatch, but Boris was purposefully over-the-top, while John Wick is presented to us like a serious movie.
And there's the hilarious scene in club sauna where Russian mafia guys actually sing Kalinka-Malinka. It's about as stupid as American criminals getting reading Dr Seuss aloud together. In real life there's a whole genre of criminal songs called Blatnyak and in many ways it fulfills the same function as some types of rap; it's songs sung by criminals (or people pretending to be them), for criminals and about criminals. This is something that Russian mafia could actually sing. Not goddamn Russian 19th century songs that were common on Soviet TV!
And I could accept all that, even though it's crazy to see this silliness in 2014, if not for one thing: somehow this movie pretends that it actually is ABOUT Russians. Russians are everywhere, they talk about their thoughts, customs, motivations, et cetera et cetera, while NONE OF THIS has ANYTHING to do with real Russians. This reminds me of a historical museum scene in the movie called "Idiocracy" in which future people got so stupid they think that Charlie Chaplin fought with Nazis and dinosaurs that shot lasers. That's how far this movie is from reality, and for the life of me I simply can't understand WHY the authors of this movie tried to talk about things that they literally know nothing about.