John Wick

Frequent readers may have noticed that my current workload has compelled me to keep recent posts on the shorter side. But I thought you good folks deserved some red meat. So I’ve made time to review the neo-noir stylistic sensation John Wick.

I revisited this series recently. And with nigh on a decade between the first film’s release and this writing – though it seems longer – the trilogy seemed ripe for a fresh appraisal.

First the background. John Wick was the passion project of screenwriter Derek Kolstad Longing for the kind of bombastic action movies Hollywood hadn’t made since the 90s, Stahelski decided to write one himself. Originally titled Scorn, the casting of 90s action leading man Keanu Reeves led to a title change when Reeves fell in love with the eponymous character’s name.

And it was Reeves’ advocacy that put Chad Stahelski, a stuntman notorious for his work on The Matrix and The Crow, in the director’s chair. Stahelski had doubled for Reeves in some of his most iconic actioners; now it was his turn to direct the multi-talented star.

The fact that this production got off the ground is itself a minor miracle. With the MCU taking the industry by storm and Hollywood more risk-averse than ever, the smart money would’ve been against a first-time director filming a script by a relatively new writer. On its face, studio executives would be unlikely to expect such a project to satisfy the other Hollywood Formula.

But as people in the know have said, one of the few exceptions to the formula is the attachment of an A list celebrity to a project. In that sense and others, we must consider John Wick as much Keanu’s baby as anyone’s.

Because the studio took a gamble on Reeves’ name, and boy, did it pay off.

We’re talking a total box office take more than quadruple its budget. Figure in advertising costs, and they still doubled their money.

Which pretty much automatically triggers a sequel, but more on that later.

For now, it’s plot synopsis time.

The elevator pitch is straightforward.

• Gangsters rob recent widower (complete with kick-the-dog moment)
• Burglary/carjacking victim turns out to be a retired assassin who makes Leon the Professional, Keyser Söze, and Michael Myers look like Shirley Temple.
• Assassin comes back to exact bloody vengeance against the offending gangsters and anyone who gets in his way.

Initial thought: another popular revenge movie. Those seem to strike a chord for some reason …

Though the overall plot is simple, John Wick‘s shooty, explody surface overlays unexpected depths.

No review of this film would be complete without at least mentioning the robust and fleshed-out criminal world the story tears through. The film makers have constructed a sophisticated underworld that operates as a full-fledged parallel society. The concept of Jianghu from Chinese Wuxia is the closest analogue I can think of. In both instances, characters who wish to enter one world must adopt its rules and customs while forsaking the rules of the world they left behind.

Now, midwits like to gush about symbolism. John Wick manages the impressive feat of using symbols effectively. The most prominent example is the gold coins exchanged by underworld figures throughout the series. As Dean Koontz said, “Stained glass windows don’t have subtitles.” So it is in the underworld of John Wick, where wiseguys are shown to prize this coinage, which is exclusive to them.

So exclusive as to be definitive, as demonstrated when John begins his return to the underworld by digging up a cache of these coins.

It soon becomes clear from character interactions alone that the coins aren’t units of monetary exchange. Instead, they represent social capital: tokens of the favors men of honor owe to one another. The third film subtitles the window on this front, but that’s another post.

All in all, John Wick‘s underworld achieves a feat that the Matrix films mishandled. It establishes a secondary secret world and merges it with ours physically. Instead of forcing this duality with technology, John Wick does it with rules, customs, and symbols that keep the underworld hidden from normies. That is a monumental accomplishment this series doesn’t get nearly enough credit for.

A small point you may have missed that underscores how effective and complete this underworld’s separation from everyday life is: Despite all the carnage and mayhem that occurs throughout the movie’s run time, only one police officer ever appears on screen.

And when he realizes what’s going on, he wastes no time uninvolving himself.

Touches like that make John Wick’s secondary world more than just a backdrop against which action is set. It’s the medium through which the action flows.

If John Wick has one shortcoming, it’s the final showdown with the big mob boss. After watching John massacre whole crews of gangsters and extricate himself from seemingly impossible situations, seeing him stab an already battered old man to death comes as something of an anticlimax. In due justice, the film makers cop to doing it that way on purpose because they admittedly couldn’t figure out how to make it a challenge for John. So they switched focus from the action to character. And it’s satisfying enough.

A final note/speculation about John’s character. Throughout the movie, his criminal prey speak of him as a sort of bogeyman: the guy hardened button men check under their beds for at night. Through informed attribution, he is credited with an unspecified impossible task that enabled his exit from the underworld to normal life.

In a further important clue, it’s revealed that John’s mob nickname was Baba Yaga. This term is translated as “bogeyman” but it’s a specific reference to a crone or hag of Slavic folklore. Baba Yaga appears in the tale Vasilisa the Beautiful, the Russian version of Hansel and Gretel, where she fills the role of the child-eating witch.

This comparison is apt, since John’s main goal in the movie is to kill a Russian mob boss’ son.

But you can’t discount the underlying thread of Greek myth running through John’s arc. Like Heracles, he accomplished impossible labors. Like Orpheus, he journeyed to the underworld and back. But there’s another pseudo-divine figure from Greek mythology that’s even more like John: Nemesis, the force sent to exact divine punishment for the sin of hubris.

This next part gets rather meta, so bear with me.

Hansel and Gretel pops up in a different movie released 20 years to the month before John Wick. In New Nightmare, horror maestro Wes Craven merged his fictional dream world from A Nightmare on Elm Street with then-contemporary Los Angeles. His landmark series, too, featured a child-murdering character. And in this particular installment, Craven says outright that Freddy Krueger is the same entity as the witch from Hansel and Gretel.

New Nightmare further establishes that this entity can be trapped in the right kind of story but can escape if the tales lose prominence in the zeitgeist. A new story is required to trap it again.

There’s little question that A Nightmare on Elm Street went moribund after the reviled 2010 remake. By Craven’s internal story logic, that would have freed the witch entity from its Freddy Krueger form.

Robert Englund’s dialogue from New Nightmare also implies that the form taken by the entity in a given story can reduce its evil.

So John Wick is the new incarnation of Freddy Krueger, for those who want to believe.

With a hit on their hands and a sequel greenlighted, how did John Wick‘s creators fare on their second outing?

Find out next time!

 

Until then, get your fix of action and thrills in my acclaimed horror-adventure series: