Good action movies, the kind that make you wince in pain one second and then pump your fist with excitement the next, were so prevalent when I was growing up in the 80s and are so rare now that whenever one comes along it feels like you’ve stumbled onto some kind of priceless artifact, or like you’re indulging in some sort of outdated thrill that’s long since been made illegal. The only differences between action movies then and action movies now though is a willingness on the part of studios to embrace an R-rating and a willingness on the part of experienced directors who know how to construct an action scene to work in the genre. Too often now the action film, which should be aimed toward a niche audience, is instead aimed at a wide one, and the results are homogenized and bland movies. And too often the genre is used as a proving ground for new filmmakers who have just come off of making music videos or web shorts, and the results are movies that are messy and hard to follow, thanks to the people in charge learning while on the job and having to take editing shortcuts to simulate spectacles that were beyond their capabilities of actually creating.
John Wick, a new action-heavy revenge film that stars Keanu Reeves as a former assassin who goes on a rampage after a group of young mafioso punks steal his car and kill his dog, is one of those rare modern movies that does action right. It’s exciting, it’s brutal, it’s gritty, and it knows how to construct action scenes that are both thrilling to look at and also easy to appreciate. Maybe that’s because its first-time directors, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, both have lengthy lists of credits working as Hollywood stuntmen. Could it be possible that these guys got sick of punishing their bodies to create action scenes that were ultimately ruined thanks to the close-in camerawork and quick-editing of filmmakers who weren’t savvy enough to exploit their efforts, so they decided to take matters into their own hands and make their own movie where the craftsmanship of the stuntmen and fight choreographers could be featured front and center? Whatever their motivations, Leitch and Stahelski have made a movie that at least feels like it was put together by frustrated action junkies with something to prove.
The action sequences they’ve created are amazing, and truly deserve the spotlight they get. John Wick makes great use of that style of fighting that’s been come to be known “gun-fu,” where gunplay and hand-to-hand combat are seamlessly blended to create a ballet of death and destruction, but that’s not all the movie has to offer. It features gun-heavy scenes, punch-heavy scenes, scenes that blend both, car chases, car crashes, stunts, explosions, and basically any other kind of over-the-top violence you can imagine a testosterone-heavy hero engaging himself in, and the action is all so well-choreographed and well-executed that it’s clearly the product of a team of filmmakers who are shooting everything with the enjoyment of their viewers in mind.
The camera is pulled back on the action and relatively still, so that you can appreciate the way the performers fighting onscreen chain moves together into sequences, and so that the combatants are the ones providing any given scene with its sense of motion, instead of the camera. The edits are relatively few, so that you can appreciate the fact that the performers on screen are really pulling a lot of this stuff off, and that it’s not just a trick of perspective and jumbled confusion. That’s not even to say that the filmmaking here isn’t stylish either, because it is. There are plenty of places where the filmmakers are able to confidently show off by moving their camera in innovative ways, and there are plenty of sequences that edit down the action so that it really cooks—but we never get drown in the filmmaking. It’s there to accentuate the stunts and the fights rather than to replace them.
The action in John Wick is appropriately violent too—brutally so. Many of these “fill-in-the-blank-fu” movies are so choreographed and rehearsed that it feels like you’re watching something that’s more dance than fight, and the fact that you’re watching people being murdered begins to escape you. Not so here. The fights are intricate and fast, and the Wick character is smooth and mannered when he’s doing his thing, but the things he does also rattle teeth and break bones. When someone gets hit, they get hit hard, and we see their bodies buckle. When a car crashes, the impact is loud, and the result is broken glass and twisted metal. Most importantly though, when the bullets are flying through the air, they hit their mark, they tear through flesh, and they show off how deadly the situations these characters find themselves in truly are. Wick kills so many people by shooting them in the head in this movie—so many glorious, red mist headshots. For fans of filthy, throwback action movies, it’s basically a dream.
John Wick is better than being just a spectacle though, because we’re not just presented with a faceless video game character throwing down on the screen, we’re given a hero who we understand and who we can relate to, and our emotional investment elevates the effects of the already amazing action. If the old cliché that “a hero is only as great as his villain” rings true, then it must be doubly true for revenge movies, where we’re asked to care about a protagonist who exacts brutal, systematic revenge on a group of victims. It’s true that Keanu is strong as Wick, looking fully engaged, not going robotic with his line delivery, not just coasting on his established persona, and giving the most nuanced performance we’ve seen out of him in a while, but the real reason we care about John Wick so much is that the film does such a great job of making you hate the people that he’s going after. They suck so bad that you’d cheer for basically anybody who gave them what was coming to them.
From casting the cretinous Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones’ Theon Greyjoy) as the leader of the punks who cross Wick, to constantly showing he and his goons indulging in hedonistic partying while there’s serious work to be done, to always having their presence announced by obnoxiously loud, bottom-of-the-barrel rap music, to picking the cutest dog on the planet to be Wick’s beloved pet and then having them inflict brutal violence on it, every opportunity is given to the viewer to develop a hatred for the antagonists and a sympathy for the hero. The film exploits the hatred most everyone already has for entitled trust-fund kids, which, in a world with growing income inequality and a society in which we increasingly coddle our children, is only growing, and uses it to whip us into a murderous blood lust that can only be satisfied by Wick punishing these cell phone-toting twerps in the most embarrassing ways possible. He takes away their power—which they flaunt but haven’t earned—which is a fantasy that many of us have had when faced with an entitled young person acting obnoxiously and without empathy, and which is a satisfying fantasy to experience vicariously through a movie hero.
As badass and refreshing as it is, John Wick isn’t a case of a couple of first time directors hitting a complete home run though, as there were a couple details that seemed to fall through the cracks. Probably the most egregious example of the crafting of the film not being up to snuff is the script, which is credited to Derek Kolstad. It’s a perfectly serviceable framework for delivering action scenarios, but it also could have used another rewrite or two. It’s not that there are plot holes, or that much of the premise of the movie is brainless—those are the types of things that matter little in a movie where the action delivers—it’s that the characters get underserved by existing as shorthand archetypes for heroes and villains, and that the things they say are distractingly generic.
Showing us a guy loving a dog is a quick way to get us invested in him, and showing us another group of guys killing the dog is a good way to get us to hate them, but it’s only enough of a foundation to build a movie that’s going to serve as a momentary distraction on. Taking the time to flesh out the unique personalities and individual motivations of these characters a bit, and giving the actors dialogue to work with that doesn’t sound like it’s been copy/pasted from other movies we’ve seen a thousand times before, could have been all it took to make John Wick something truly special that action junkies would talk about and revisit for years to come. As is, it’s a pretty damn good example of a mindless action flick that will take you out of this world and allow you to watch bad guys get bullets put in their foreheads for a few hours, and that isn’t a bad thing to be at all, especially in an era where fun action films are so few and far between. Oh, those glorious, R-rated headshots.
