How John Wickrestored My Faith in Violent Movies
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How John Wick Restored My Faith in Violent Movies BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 29, 2014 could be a skewed conception of what they think here’s too much violence in movies today audiences now expect. We’ve been conditioned to -- too much of the wrong kind, though if you believe action is more exciting when it’s diced to asked me what the “right” kind is, I would bits and presented to us in a choppy mosaic. When only be able to tell you that I know it when I I’ve complained about this, action-movie fans have Tsee it. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s John Wick -- often taken that “Listen here, little lady” tone with in which Keanu Reeves plays a former hit man lured me: “Well, that’s what a fight or a car chase is like back to his old life by a savage murder -- is brutal as when you’re right inside it.” The so-called immersive hell, a panoply of stabbings and shootings, stranglings experience has come to mean more than visual logic. and If the event clubbings, being that you depicted is almost chaotic, the certainly filmmaking wouldn’t has to want to be, too. take your That’s mother not the to see, way Sam provided Peckinpah, she isn’t Brian De Ma Barker. Palma, But John Quentin Wick has Tarantino, stuck with or John me in ways Woo would I didn’t IFC Films think of it, expect, but their and it’s ways of rekindled David Lee/Lionsgate seeing my faith in violent action movies. It isn’t perfect, seem to be outmoded. Incoherent action has become but it’s a flying leap in the right direction, and so commonplace that I doubt many filmgoers the key to it -- or at least one key -- is that it was even notice it anymore. What John Wick brings made not by some guy who’s most comfortable back to action movies is the sense of violence as a when fixated on a video monitor, but by barbarous ballet deserving a long take -- who wants people who actually know how to move. to watch a grand pas that’s gone through the visual Stahelski, the movie’s director, and Leitch, its woodchipper? Even in its most savage moments, producer, are veteran stuntmen who in recent years John Wick revels in the glory of human movement. have been devising fight choreography for movies I wouldn’t call the action sequences precise -- that’s like The Bourne Legacy, Expendables 3, and the the wrong word when you’re talking about the way Hunger Games series. But even well-choreographed joints and muscles and nerves work in tandem, action sequences aren’t always shot and edited as beautiful in their very imperfection -- but I would clearly as they ought to be. That’s not necessarily out call it specific, planned and executed in a way that the of ineptitude on the part of directors and editors; it camera can easily follow. Every lunge, every rapid-fire 1 spin, every kick to the ribs, every last-ditch swerve murder happens swiftly, early in the picture (there’s to dodge a bullet has a reason for existing -- each is a no sadistic, making-us-wait game going on here), small event, leading to another and yet another, with and you don’t see it. And it’s what happens afterward perhaps just a few ticks of a second in between. It’s that’s most wrenching: The camera follows a always possible to tell who’s coming from where, trail of bloody smudges to the spot where Wick is even if you can’t see the specific “who” in question: just waking up; the puppy had used the last bit of In one gruesomely witty sequence, set in a men’s spa, her strength to crawl close to him. I groaned as I we see a victim-to-be blithely grooming himself in watched this. I’m extremely wary of animal death as a mirror, even as another guy, reflected in another a dramatic device: It can be done well, but it can also mirror, meets his maker. The movie takes visible be used as a blunt tool against the audience, and I pride in its own craftsmanship. It’s a look-at-me wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about it this time. picture that actually gives us something to look at. But the puppy death in John Wick isn’t a And there’s obvious joy in the way Stahelski and throwaway, not in the way it’s treated by the Leitch -- and cinematographer Jonathan Sela and filmmakers, and not in the context of Reeves’s editor Elisabet Ronaldsdottir -- showcase Reeves. performance. Daisy’s death leaves a hole in the movie, Over the years, critics -- people who are often afraid and that’s as it should be. Even after I went home, of looking foolish, and more’s the pity -- have been the memory of her kept me up most of the night. I quick to identify Reeves as a “bad” actor (in just was haunted by her even though, as a person who about everything except the Matrix movies), as if sees hundreds of movies a year, I’m well aware of the doing so were a way to advertise their good taste. tricks and techniques filmmakers use to get to us. Reeves isn’t flashy, but there’s a calming gravity The more I thought about it, the more I realized in his presence -- when it looks as if he’s doing that Reeves was haunting me too -- Wick’s grief over nothing, he’s often just riding the moment. Maybe not just his wife but this small, completely charming that’s why he makes such a marvelous action hero: creature is muted but intense, like a radioactive He’s a man of action who appears to have already ray, something you can feel more than see. His rage thought everything through. He moves decisively over the Russian thugs’ cruelty sets the movie in and with innate elegance, like a ‘30s movie star who’s motion, and then there’s no stopping it. The lead taken tons of fencing lessons. Even when kicking baddie, Iosef -- played with villainous efficiency by ass, there’s a courtliness about him, as if the sweet Alfie Allen -- values no life beyond his own, dog’s or gallantry of old Bill & Ted lines like “Our girlfriends man’s. With every fiber of my being, I wanted Wick are most chaste!” had seeped into his bones. to smoke that creep -- the movie is designed to make Reeves is a quiet, economical actor. His feelings you feel that way. But the heartsickness at the core always simmer just beneath the surface, and that of Reeves’s performance keeps the vicarious revenge undercurrent of raw awareness makes one scene impulse in check. It’s satisfying when Iosef finally in John Wick nearly unbearable to watch. Early bites the dust, but Daisy is still gone. Thankfully, on, we learn that Wick’s wife has died from some the filmmakers offer a balm for that wound in unspecified illness. We see him get through the the end -- partly because the audience needs it, funeral, in the usual blur of grief, but at home that but more because they just know what’s right. evening, he’s left alone with his sorrow. The doorbell John Wick isn’t perfect. It could actually stand rings: Before she died, his wife (played by Bridget to be funnier, more cartoonish, though I laughed Moynihan and seen only on a cellphone screen grimly and perhaps embarrassingly often. And I and in dreamlike shards of flashback) arranged for admit that I did watch some of this blood spurting a beagle puppy to be delivered to him, as a way of and bone cracking, bullets piercing sternums, and easing his loneliness. The dog has come with a tag so forth, through what my friend and colleague emblazoned with her name, Daisy. When she arrives, David Edelstein calls Fingervision. What’s more, at Wick eyes her with slight skepticism, sizing her up the screening I attended, which was a mix of media in all her wiggly-waggly adorableness. The next types and regular citizens, someone had brought a morning, with nothing to feed her, he pours her a small child, who began crying halfway through. That bowl of cornflakes with a splash of milk. She snuffles distressed me. John Wick isn’t a movie for kids. them right down, her tag jingling against the bowl. But it’s dangerous, for the health and vitality But because Wick, through no fault of his own, has of the adult culture at large, to decry violent gotten on the bad side of some Russian mobsters, movies out of fear that the wrong people will see Daisy very soon thereafter meets a bad end. The them. And it would be hypocritical for me to do 2 so, given how much I love action-movie violence when it’s done well. Why do I love it so much? Because it can be cathartic? Because, when a filmmaker knows what he or she is doing, it can be like dance? Because, seemingly paradoxically, the best violent movies are so full of life that they make me feel more alive? Or am I really just kind of twisted, the way millions of us seem to be? John Wick, a mainstream entertainment that’s heavily flawed and remarkable at once, answers none of those questions definitively for me.