Wick the Pain Away
John Wick / directed by Chad Stahelski & David Leitch
Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, part of me keeps wanting to pop the bubble of my experience of John Wick - to prick the Wick, so to speak. The motivations given to its titular character for enacting the central revenge plot are, from a certain perspective, stunningly manipulative and psychologically simplistic. But I think this move is deliberate, not ham-handed, and that the filmmakers have intended to make an action flick that is pure and even meta in its execution, acknowledging the conventions of the genre by taking them to their extremes, and making it work through all those elements that really matter in a good action film: style, pacing, tone, a sympathetic hero, and of course the choreography of violence. On this last point, the film is a virtual ballet of mesmerizing fisticuffs and gunplay, and often a combination of the two -- I can’t remember the last film I saw with so many pointblank gunshots delivered like NRA-endorsed punches to foreheads and vital organs.
We start off in a gauzy world of loss, as a montage shows John Wick’s (Keanu Reeves) wife perish from a terminal illness. Back home, alone, he receives an expected delivery - a puppy, along with a note from his wife saying she ordered this puppy for him on her deathbed in order to give him something to love and hang onto in her absence. This canine insertion is the decisive and central brazen act of the film. The puppy is ridiculously cute, some sort of beagle from the looks of it, and it trundles adorably after John Wick as puppies are wont to do. Wick’s gentle interactions with the pup, his evident intention to take his wife’s last wishes to heart, remind us of all the loving human contact he has just lost.
So it is all a little bit over the top when Russian thugs break into John Wick’s house, beat him up, steal his car, and yes, kill his puppy. This in turn leads to a basic opening up of the Gates of Hell -- turns out that John Wick is the bad-assest hitman ever, and intends to seek revenge for the killing of his furry companion, not to mention the theft of his car.
Yet, in the world of the film, this setup works, at least partly because Wick is clearly acting primarily out of sorrow, not rage - even before we are explicitly told that the death of the puppy robbed him of his hope for the future, we get this on an intuitive level. Without hope, all he can do is deal out death, to remove hope from his enemies as they have done to him. And as I noted above, it also works because it’s such a clear nod to the emotional mechanisms of revenge films in general.
The baddie responsible for stealing his hope, Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), just happens to be the son of Wick’s former employer, an occasionally jocular but overall quite menaching Russian crimelord played with aplomb by Michael Nyqvist; and so Wick’s arc of revenge brings him right back into the old life of crime he left five years ago.
I’ve been futzing over whether the psychological setup makes sense, but perhaps sweeping all questions of motivation before it is the elegant and extreme violence that erupts as the implacable will of Wick smashes into mobsters who throw everything they have at him. Wick is methodical, shadowy, and deadly, like a pistol-toting ninja, or Batman with a sidearm; in one epic sequence, he carves his way through the neon and swirl of a dance club, sentry by sentry, to get to his prey. The fights are deeply physical; you have a strong sense of bodies in motion, in contact. Unlike most action films, the camera lets you see what’s going on, rather than simply creating the illusion of something happening.
Attired in a finely-tailored suit, Wick is a man who is supremely good at his job. Rather than the type of warrior who kills with whatever comes to hand, he has his preferred tools: pistol, machine gun, hands (and I suppose I should include car as well; just as we have a strong sense of the physicality of human bodies, so we do with the cars as well, as they spin, smash, and skid, weapons wielded by their expert driver).
Wick is cold-blooded but not mean; honorable but not naive. Of course, it is hard not to find yourself thinking that Reeves’ Wick may be a little TOO nice. As he sits at an underworld bar and talks with a bartender who knew him way back when, she comments that she likes how he is now, showing some vulnerability. Sure, SHE sees the contrast with what he was before - but WE never really get a sense of his former edge, of what would make someone into such a relentless killer. Worse, we don’t even get a hint of an edge, which might have been enough. Instead, we have the smooth charisma of Reeves, who with his leontine and easy movements is persuasively predatory - enough to sweep us along, but perhaps not to pull us in all the way. Yet ultimately this may be the match that works best for the film - an actor who keeps it moving like the well-designed action machine that it is, who holds our attention and captures our sympathy without bogging us down in questions of character and motivation. Reeves isn’t the only well-cast actor in the film. Ian McShane dials down his intensity to 9 as an enigmatic hotel proprietor, Willem Defoe dials up his sympathy quotient as a helpful fellow hitman, and Nyqist digs heartily into a character that runs from the forbidding to the ridiculous. Indeed, I would go so far as to characterize the casting as pleasurable, and there’s a palpable chemistry among the actors. For a film about killing and revenge, there’s an immense amount of life and energy in John Wick. And there’s a good deal of black humor sprinkled throughout; though it’s serious about the business at hand, this is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously.