Save yourself a couple of hours

Rating: 2/10 (24 January 2015)

I don't normally write reviews but this one took me by such a surprise I thought I'd try and save some other viewers from wasting their time.
Before watching this I had a look on IMDb. Normally anything above a 6 is watchable. This was 7.3 so I thought it'd be our movie for the evening. Unanimously the group of us thought it was dire.
Problems
The plot. The set up for the story is unbelievable. We spend 15 minutes looking at Wick mourning his wife at the start of the movie. It wasn't the most riveting stuff. Later in the movie we find out that everybody in New York (I think) seems to know who John Wick is. Except for the 3 idiots that stole his car. Which brings me to them. Why would they bother stealing his car. What was their motive. Yeah it's a nice car but they stole it to sell it. They didn't need the money. Apparently there's only one cop in America. We see about 100 people die in this movie in the city and the only cop we see is at Wicks house.
Some corny scenes. We don't see how Wick is the bogeyman. We get told it. That seemed cheap to me. Did you know he killed 3 guys in a bar, with a pencil. Great, good to know. Wick had the main car thief in his sights half way through the movie. He could have shot him there and then. Nope, we're only half way through the movie so I'll just look at him when I'm pointing my gun at him. When he runs about 10 seconds later, I'll start shooting. The hotel manager meeting the girl assassin to tell her that her admission to the hotel had been revoked permanently only to have her shot immediately. Did he really need to make the trip. The bit with Wick and his "mate" at the graveyard. That was some of the driest dialog I've ever seen. "Fuel the chopper". Good god. Has anybody ever made a phone call to say that to anybody ever. Why wouldn't the chopper be fuelled already. Are they stored empty. Why not just say we're on our way, have the chopper ready. The main bad guy has Wick tied up and ready to die. Rather than finish the job I'll leave it to my too henchmen and I'll run off to my car to drive off. Can you guess what's going to happen next. When Wicks finished his killing spree and going to head off into the sunset I'll kill his only mate and ring him up to tell him.
What annoyed me most I think is that with a bit more effort the film could have been good. How about at the start of the movie have his wife killed by an attempted carjacking, rather than having 15 minutes of him moping around after she died of cancer. I could get behind his killing spree then rather than him going off after his dog (which he had for 2 days) was killed.
On the plus side Keanu was on top form, in the action scenes. In the dialog scenes he wasn't so good but I think that's more to do with the dialog being so bad.