John Wick (2014)
Directed by Chad Stahelski
Ex-hitman John Wick comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that took everything from him.
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48 films that influenced John Wick
What critics say influenced John Wick
Keanu’s tunnel-vision determination (“You killed my dog”) recalls that of Lee Marvin (“I just want my money”) in John Boorman’s Point Blank.
Some of its self-assured cool comes courtesy of the influence of Jean-Pierre Melville, who pioneered the subgenre of the existential hit man movie with Le Samouraï , and whose Le Cercle Rouge receives an homage in Wick in the form of a nightclub called the Red Circle.
Some of its self-assured cool comes courtesy of the influence of Jean-Pierre Melville, who pioneered the subgenre of the existential hit man movie with Le Samouraï , and whose Le Cercle Rouge receives an homage in Wick in the form of a nightclub called the Red Circle.
Reeves’ channels Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (with an attempt at “High Plains Drifter”) and he gets it fifty percent right, which is good enough for this flick.
Done right as in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”, it can be memorable.
Wick is the smoothest cinematic death-dealing machine since Vince in Collateral (the "Red Circle" nightclub scene in John Wick is very reminiscent of the former), though Leitch and Stahelski increase the body count by an order of magnitude while also creating a somewhat fantastical secret society of killers who operate by that code of ethics peculiar to fictional underworld types.
Nodding to Michael Mann's Collateral, the picture is so attuned to information that you can actually keep count of Wick's victims: including seven in a church, nine from a car park, and 20 from a particularly bloody nightclub sequence.
Michael Mann’s Collateral comes to mind, especially during the Red Circle sequence, though Leitch and Stahelski favor a less impressionistic style, using clean, wide compositions and pivoting camera movements to emphasize the finesse of their performers.
The movie’s awareness of its own movieness is underlined by lots of shallow focus and anamorphic lens flares, and one extended shootout at a neon-lit nightclub—the movie’s high point—seems straight out of Collateral .
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“John will come for you and you will do nothing because there is nothing you can do,” he says channelling Taken .
It’s odd for Reeves, a languid, mild-mannered performer, to play a roughneck outlaw, but Liam Neeson was a gentle fellow before murdering his way to riches in those “Taken” thrillers.
Even the Taken movies have to carefully edit around an increasingly-sluggish Liam Neeson .
Not that he’s been gone that long–or deviated that much from his persona–but this later-stage butt-kicking does call to mind Liam Neeson ’s recent resurgence in movies like “ Taken ,” “ The Grey ” and “ Non-Stop .”
It's basically Taken, but with Liam Neeson's daughter played by a foot-long beagle.
It should come as no surprise that John Wick is cross-promoting with Payday 2. There are a lot of cinematic antecedents that could be mentioned in discussing John Wick, but this reminded me most strongly of the Mel Gibson version of Payback .
There’s a great line John Wayne has in 1976’s “The Shootist,” where his gunslinger character explains his deadly reputation: “Sometimes it isn’t being fast that counts, or even accurate, but willing.
A sadistic Russian creep named Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen, attempting to top Andy Robinson's chortling psychopath in "Dirty Harry") and his two stooges drool over Wick's vintage 1969 Steve McQueen-grade Boss Ford Mustang.
Such beautiful visual clarity extends to their action centerpieces, which balance graceful fluidity and ultra-violent gunplay and hand-to-hand combat in a way that would make even the maestro of pistols-and-punches mayhem, John Woo (The Killer, Hard Boiled), giddy with excitement.
It is hard to think of a movie like, say, Leon: The Professional (1994) or John Wick (2014), without acknowledging the influence of Woo’s work.
Such beautiful visual clarity extends to their action centerpieces, which balance graceful fluidity and ultra-violent gunplay and hand-to-hand combat in a way that would make even the maestro of pistols-and-punches mayhem, John Woo (The Killer, Hard Boiled), giddy with excitement.
The action is of course breath-taking, but John Woo manages to inject his spectacles with real emotion and meaning – something that Hollywood has struggled to replicate, barring titles such as “John Wick” (2014), and “The Raid” (2011).
In fact, the film feels a lot like “Bullet to the Head,” the recent Walter Hill flick starring a revenge-thirsty Sylvester Stallone – which should never be confused with Woo’s blunt and brutal 1990 Chinese version of “The Deer Hunter,” “Bullet in the Head.”
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The great revenge movies – the original Death Wish, the first Taken movie – work because the stakes are intensely personal.
While killing a dog hardly seems enough to justify the meticulously orchestrated mayhem that follows, we should at least be grateful the pic doesn’t impose some greater emotional trauma upfront (like forcing us to witness his wife’s rape or murder, a la “Death Wish”).
Fine actors like Willem Dafoe and John Leguizamo are wasted in crêpe-thin roles, while Nyqvist, best known for portraying Mikael Blomkvist in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, becomes progressively more hammy as the film continues, ultimately reaching "Gary Oldman in The Professional" levels.
But they also appear to have taken a few pages from the heyday of arty action like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, films that were built not on anything real, but on our collective cinematic dreams of genre.
But they also appear to have taken a few pages from the heyday of arty action like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, films that were built not on anything real, but on our collective cinematic dreams of genre.