“John Wick”
Don’t set him off.
Yup, that’s the tagline for the new Keanu Reeves action/thriller that hit theatres this past weekend.
“Don’t set him off.”
It doesn’t get any more primitive than that. This tagline is archaic. Even a caveman could understand what the marketers of this film were going for. It’s John WICK for crying out loud! DO NOT SET HIM OFF!
You get it? Wick… Don’t set him off? It’s mind boggling how they came up with this? Yet every single billboard I drive by that says “John Wick: Don’t set him off” I just have to say it in my “tough guy voice.” (So yes, their marketing campaign worked on me.)
It’s John Wick, dagnabbit! You DO NOT, for the life of you, want to set him off!
I’m giving you fair warning right now…. DON’T set him off.
Yet that is EXACTLY what every bad guy in this movie does. They set John Wick off.
John Wick (Reeves) is a retired hitman who just lost his wife to cancer. He is mourning her loss in the confines of his home when a crew of Russian mobsters come to steal his car and take the last gift his dying wife gave him (a puppy).
You see, what these Russkies didn’t know was that John Wick is the biggest badass in the tri-state area.
And they just set him off.
This illegal acquisition of John Wick’s car sets off a chain of events that will eventually lead to the demise of all bad Russians in New York and New Jersey. And going down with those bad Russians are all the bad Russian stereotypes that come along with them, like their terrible accents and their love for vodka.
Is the film good?
Yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. It’s surely not going to win any Oscars, but there’s a market for “tough guy action movies” and this one definitely fits the bill.
This is a guys movie. It’s a revenge film with its share of explosions. It has a lot of action sequences and a whole bunch of killing. Men will like this movie.
I would throw this film into the same category as this years Denzel vehicle “The Equalizer,” but with one noticeable difference: The gunshot killings were so much cooler in this movie.
Keanu brings a new type of swagger to his character that I haven’t seen in his previous films. He kills people with his gun in newer, funner, more graphic ways. He gets that weapon right up in your grill and kills ya! His hand-to-hand fighting sequences are great too. So much movement going on in these fight scenes. It’s like a perfectly choreographed dance between two gangsters with one of them always ending up on the short end of the “Wick.”
Sounds like a great film, right. There were some flaws. But these are flaws that are in EVERY action movie. Like the fact that John Wick can hit every single Russian in the city except the one he is actually targeting. Or when the Wickster is finally caught, why don’t the bad guys just kill him instead of talking to him for 35 minutes? Or how does Keanu keep such perfectly coiffed hair throughout every fight sequence?
But I digress. I know that this is how action films need to be made to keep the plot moving forward. (Otherwise, we’d have a 12 minute movie… and that’s not nearly enough time to set John Wick off.)
Let’s get to the acting.
Keanu Reeves was limited in his speaking scenes because all of his lines were maybe 5 to 15 words at a time… But I liked that because it made him seem darker and more mysterious.
All the Russians in the film seemed too Russian. I’m not even sure what that means but they weren’t that good.
Willem Dafoe played a hitman who ended up being a guardian angel for John Wick. He was delightful. (He usually is.)
And Dean Winters was in this film. You don’t know Dean Winters? He’s the “Mayhem” guy in those Allstate Insurance commercials. I liked him a lot in this. He was kind of funny.
So there you have it. “John Wick.”
I liked it a lot. It may not be the best movie ever, but I was completely entertained.
Maybe “Keanu” films are a guilty pleasure of mine. Maybe I’m a meatball and I like almost every movie I see.
Or maybe it was the marketing of this film because I fell for this movie “Wick, line and sinker.”
Matty W. Kelley, reporting.
mattywkelley.com