John Wick

2014 action movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A retired assassin mourns the loss of his dog.

He had that dog for about 4 minutes of movie time. I think it's interesting that the plot is really driven by the loss of a dog, and at first, I thought that was just the way I was reading things. But late in the movie, Wick whines, "You shouldn't have killed my dog," or something, and I realized that I was really supposed to think that the killing of a dog a guy's had for a day or two has led to the slaughter of about 200 people.

Here's a question: How are they going to make a sequel to this since Keanu Reeves killed everybody in the world except himself in this first movie? Is the sequel going to be a remake of A Boy and His Dog?

The dog thing is ludicrous, but I guess that fits with the entire movie. This movie's plot is thin. Here, we'll use a little object lesson to give you an idea of what the plot is like. Get a sheet of paper. That represents the plot of this movie, your typical revenge-type stuff. Have somebody hold it by the top and bottom while you drop a bunch of guns and a car chase on top of it. Then, cut yourself open and bleed all over it. That paper's going to fall apart. And that's what's going on with this movie. It's just enough of a plot for the piles and piles of action sequences and blood to make sense. The action scenes are well enough done, but they start to feel redundant pretty quickly. There's one point in the movie where a character is playing a first-person-shooter video game, and it's kind of hard to tell when the action switches between the video game and the movie. It's really the same thing over and over again in murkily-lit settings. Reeves might be getting to an age where he's too old for this kind of thing. He's never not convincing as a stone-cold killing machine in this, but it has more to do with camera angles and editing than anything he's physically doing. And there seems to be something goofy with the way the guy holds a gun. I wouldn't know because I don't have experience with firing guns, but it just looked off.

Keanu Reeves has never really been able to act very well. Here, he shows off a stunning range--from subdued to really subdued. He must have watched himself on film early in his career and hard himself say a line in a nonchalant, monotone manner and think, "Man, that sounded really cool. I'm going to say all of my lines like that!" It makes the character a little boring. You're kind of happy when he's not talking and just running around killing guys even when that has gotten really boring. I started thinking, "Well, this looks like the same action scene that I just saw five minutes ago, but at least I don't have to watch Keanu Reeves try to act."

It all builds to a climactic fight scene between him and an old man. Like, the rest of the movie, that's murkily lit, but it's also got added rain. It seemed anticlimactic to me, but I wouldn't know because I also don't have experience fighting old men. By that point in the movie, it was just another fight scene. You knew it was coming, which is why I don't really consider this a spoiler, and then it happens in ways that feel as cliched as the rest of the movie. Michael Nyqvist plays the old guy, Viggo, and there are a few moments with some dark humor that made him the most interesting character in this movie with not much going on. But his dialogue's really nothing new either. He's familiar, like a bad guy who wandered in from another movie. At one point, he says, "He wasn't the boogeyman. He was the one you sent when you wanted to kill the fucking boogeyman," which I would almost bet has been in another movie. Willem Dafoe is also in there, but it seems like he's just picking up a paycheck. Or maybe he just wanted to hold a gun. I don't know because I don't have experience being Willem Dafoe.

I think what bugged me most about this movie is its tone. It's all cliches and darkness, the color palette almost entirely grays and blacks until a scene that takes place in a club. Then, the action's washed in this weird lighting. Then, it's back to the blacks and grays. Combine the visual cloudiness with the kind of menacing ambient techno music you're so used to hearing in action movies from the past decade and a half and some heavier stuff once the action picks up, and you've got something that looks and sounds like way too many current movies. So I was really bored.

There's also a Marilyn Manson song, or at least one sung by him. Check out these dumbass lyrics:

"This world doesn't need no opera.
We're here for the operation.
We don't need a bigger knife
Cause we got guns, we got guns, we got guns, we got guns, we got guns.
You better run, you better run, you better run, you better run.
We're killing strangers, we're killing strangers, we're killing strangers
So we don't kill the ones we love."

Seriously, am I old or are those some really stupid lyrics?

Somebody told me this movie was good, and I shouldn't have believed him. It was something I had to watch in two installments because I fell asleep the first time. I really could have watched the thing in my sleep though. It's not the kind of movie you need to be awake for.