Pretty lights, poor show

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2015)

Very minor spoilers ahead
It's for the most part nicely shot and nicely lit. Keanu Reeves, despite hamming it up with an unnecessarily raspy voice in every scene, is also capable as the lead and there are several strong supporting characters that provide for some depth in an otherwise simplistic and shallow plot.
There ends all the good I have to say on the subject of John Wick.
Strangely enough one of the primary failures of John Wick is the sound design, it's not as godawful as Chappie with its belt fed rifles but there is a terrible discordancy here between what we're shown and what we hear. The soundtrack in particular sticks out like a sore thumb whenever Wick's "man with a purpose" leitmotif lights up. There's something to be said of the missed opportunity of including somber jazz or grunge and instead going with generic and grating hard rock in a movie which is otherwise more tonally similar to noir than typical action fare.
The plot's pacing and direction is where the film really begins to lose me however and it becomes clear rather quick that little forethought or planning was put into the script. Wick is described as a loser for example by a man who spent the preceding night trashing his very un-loser-like home and stealing a car that he admired so much he would rather keep than sell to his fence. Not enough time is spent on the titular character himself either to establish him in any way, instead what we get is a couple lines spoken about him in hushed reverence from another character - who neither he has been properly introduced at that point. And from that point on the rest of the movie is singularly focused on the revenge plot and while it plays out in a number of visually interesting settings the fight choreography, visual effects and inconsistent behaviour of Wick as well as the extremely long scenes make for a complete doozy. Instead of allowing for a gradual buildup of tension followed by brief bursts of violence our Hero dispatches enemies with such ease and in such great numbers that it's hard not to think you're watching Max Payne: The Movie. I'm reminded of a quote regarding droids in the Star Wars prequels, if our heroes are able to deal with these enemies with such ease and in such great numbers that their presence is entirely inconsequential, why even include them?
Finally there's the issue of our Russian crime boss being played by someone with a very obvious Swedish accent. I don't hold anything against Michael Nyquist but he's a poor fit for "menacing bad guy" and even if he were able to speak English without his accent there's precious little he could do with the pathetic dialogue afforded his character. Attempting to pass of a Swedish man as a Russian mobster so jarred me out of the movie I ended up simply fast-forwarding past any scene where he made an appearance, which of course meant John Wick took a nosedive towards the end.
It might be interesting to consider for a moment what could've been done with the basic themes and characters here if the project was in the hands of a competent director, editor, makeup team and effects artists but it'd be a lot simpler to simply say - don't bother.