I love these movies. The story of a man that goes on a bloody rampage when people kill his dog and steal his Mustang really speaks to me on a deep, spiritual level. Picking up from the end of the first one, John Wick: Chapter 2 has an old acquaintance of Wick contact him to call in a favor and….you know what, the details don’t matter. The plot is that another person screws over John Wick and Keanu Reeves spends two hours shooting people in the freaking face. And its glorious.
The John Wick films are a throwback to a better time, a simpler time, called the 80s. A time when action movies were fun and violent as hell. A time before Hollywood inflicted upon us the horrors of PG-13 Die Hard and Terminator movies. Wick is like a cross between Martin Riggs and John Matrix (no pun intended) as he brutally mows down henchmen and has a damn good time doing it. And like 80s action movies, this thing is unabashedly R-rated. Wick will shoot somebody 3 times in the chest and then reload just to put another in their head, because screw that guy. He kills people with a pencil in a way that shows what the pencil scene in The Dark Knight would have looked like if it was R-rated. The body count reaches cartoonish, Rambo-like numbers and it is fun as hell.
It is also refreshing to see an action movie that isn’t seemingly being filmed by a coked-up wolverine. I sat with a big smile on my face watching long action scenes shot without almost any cuts (meaning that the camera remains steady and does not cut to a different angle). I almost couldn’t believe it. After sitting through insufferable crap like Jason Bourne and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, finally an action movie where I could actually see what was happening! And with real stunt work and fight choreography! And the whole movie doesn’t look like it was created on a Mac in post-production! I never thought that modern movies would become so bad that such basic competencies would make me so happy, but goddamn does this movie do these things the right way.
Despite the simple plot, the writers also do an excellent job of world-building without forced exposition. After watching these films, you get a really good sense of how this hitman-filled world operates and the script pulls this off organically without any awkward exposition dumps. Again, this is basic screenwriting stuff and its sad that I find it so noteworthy when an action movie pulls it off nowadays. But, still, props to the screenwriters for establishing these things logically within the narrative.
If you like 80s action movies, you will love this. If you don’t love 80s action movies, then we probably shouldn’t be friends. For me, I’m glad that Keanu Reeves seemingly hasn’t aged since 1996 because I’m looking forward to more of these movies in the future.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wick:_Chapter_2#/media/File:John_Wick_Chapter_Two.png
