Technical assessment: 3
Moral assessment: 2
CINEMA rating: V18
Keanu Reeves plays
the title character John Wick, a mob assassin who would quit upon falling in
love and settling down in marriage. Five years later, his wife dies, but not
before she arranges for a dog to be brought to Wick to keep him company after
her death. One day some punks fancy
Wick’s car, and failing to grab it from him break into his home that night,
searching for the car keys to drive away in the coveted vehicle. They kill the dog to silence it, and
then beat up Wick. The incident
brings Wick out of retirement, and soon learns the leader is Josef Tarasov
(Alfie Allen), the son of his former employer, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist).
Viggo dispatches a number of his
black-suited thugs to get rid of Wick, while Wick sets out to hunt down Viggo’s
son with an ad hoc team composed of former associates, old friends and even
enemies (John Lequizamo, Willem Dafoe, Ian MacShane, Adrienne Palicki).
John Wick is an
unabashed kick-butt movie whose main protagonist is a seething volcano beneath
a placid lake. Reeves’ screen
persona is the strong, silent type; he has never been known to portray roles
that require hyper-articulation (think Robert Downey Jr.) or a touch of
flamboyance (think Johnny Depp).
His most potent asset is his
screen presence, a mixture of vulnerable looks and dynamic choreography that
usually wins audience sympathy.
This very combination, however,
tends to make the theme of John Wick—revenge—more
palatable than it should be.
Wick’s love-driven retirement as a hit man is a positive value but when
his brooding pushes him back to being a killer, something needs to be deeply
examined here. Wick’s lethal
prowess overshadows the erstwhile promise of his transformation, leaving behind
a trail of dead human beings that’s hardly worth a pet dog and a car, no matter
that the dog is from a beloved wife and the car a 1969 Ford Mustang. The picture of the Wick character that
emerges from all the blood drained and the necks snapped is that of an
emotionally inert killer who can not extricate himself anymore from the
underworld. John Wick is showing what a career in killing does to a man—despite
the power of love Wick loses the moral strength to overcome himself. He ceases to be a human being—instead
he is reduced to being a force of nature, a volcano, a hurricane or a tsunami
that has the power to destroy but has no strength to control itself. He could very well have been named not
John Wick, but John Weak.
