Review: ‘John Wick’ From The Editor

Rating: R

Genre: Action/Thriller

Runtime: 101 mins

“There’s no rhyme or reason to this life,” says a fellow assassin to the titular antihero of “John Wick.” They’re standing in a graveyard, after we’ve seen John (Keanu Reeves) bleeding from the gut, so we can take the guy at his word.

The movie does, too. In some ways this actioner is a flesh-and-blood version of a first-person-shooter video game. Guy stalks, fires gun, scores. Guy gets shot, gets up to fight again — even as punchy subtitles tell us what foreign villains are saying. Often, it’s something like, “Level 2, give me your status!”

John is a mysterious assassin whose attempt to drop out of “the life” ends when his wife dies of a disease. Some Russian thugs steal his beloved ’69 Mustang, among other bad acts, and so John goes after the guys. One of them, the vicious Iosef (Alfie Allen), is the son of a local Russian mobster, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist).

There are many great action scenes in “John Wick.” They effectively show that John is uncompromisingly brutal, as are the mobsters he is hunting down.

The cast is quite good. Keanu Reeves gives one of his best performances in the title role. He evokes our sympathy at the beginning of the film, and he makes a great action hero in the second half. Equally strong is Willem Dafoe, who plays a hitman who is a friend of his. Another good performance is by John Leguizamo, who plays another friend of John’s.

“John Wick” is one of the best revenge films in recent memory. It is a great choice for fans of action films of the 80s and 90s.

Like so many action movies, “John Wick” goes way beyond a reasonable carnage threshold. Brawls that are exciting in the beginning become dull as each sequence attempts to outdo the last. But John Wick has a more interesting story and better fights than most, not to mention, if too briefly, a puppy.