John Wick (2014) Review
8/10
A retired assassin buries his wife, receives a puppy she arranged before she died, and has the dog killed and his car stolen by a Russian gangster’s son who does not know who he is.
The 8 is for two things done at a level nobody else was managing in 2014. The action is legible, because the camera holds still and the shots run long. And the world around the action is implied and never explained, in a way most fantasy franchises never manage with ten times the budget.
The two points come off for the middle. The plot is thin by design and there is a stretch in the second half where the film runs out of reasons for anything to happen and simply supplies another room full of men.
Stuntmen Directed It and You Can See
Chad Stahelski had been Keanu Reeves’s stunt double on The Matrix. He and David Leitch came in to coordinate the fights, pitched themselves as directors, and got the job.
What they brought is a specific objection to how action was being shot. The convention by 2014 was rapid cutting and tight framing, which hides the fact that the actor is not doing the work. Stahelski and Leitch went the other way: wide frames, long takes, the whole body in shot.
That only works if the performer can do it himself. Reeves trained for months in judo and jiu-jitsu and in the specific hybrid the film uses, close-quarters grappling that ends in a gun, and because he could do it there was no need to hide a double.
The result is that you can follow every fight. You know where everyone is, what the obstacle is, and how the problem gets solved. Legibility is the entire innovation, and it reads as thrilling because tension requires the audience to understand what is happening.
Watch the reloads. Wick drops magazines and seats new ones constantly, and the film treats it as the ordinary work of the job. It also functions as a clock the audience can read, since a man counting rounds in a room full of people is a problem with a visible deadline.
Clarity is the precondition for excitement. Confusion produces noise, and audiences have been trained by bad action to read noise as intensity, which is why so much of it is exhausting instead of gripping.
In prose the equivalent is spatial discipline during a fight. The reader has to know where the characters are relative to each other and to the exits, and every paragraph that muddies that costs tension no matter how kinetic the verbs are.
Long unbroken description does for prose what a long take does for film. It commits you to continuity, which means you cannot cheat a character across a room, and the constraint improves the writing.
The World Is Built Out of Almost Nothing
There is a hotel where violence is forbidden. There is a currency of gold coins. There is a cleanup service you call, and a man who runs it treats corpses as an ordinary Tuesday. Nobody explains any of it.
That restraint is the film’s cleverest decision. Winston at the Continental says the rules once, briefly, as though everyone present already knows them, because everyone present does. The audience is the only party in the room being brought up to speed and the film declines to slow down for them.
The coins are the best example. Their value is never stated, no exchange rate is given, and they buy a table, a cleanup, a room. What matters is that everybody accepts them, which tells you there is a whole institution behind them without a single line about it.
Derek Kolstad wrote it, originally as a story about an assassin in his seventies, and Thunder Road bought the script cheaply. What survived the rewrite is a world with more implied depth than most trilogies achieve on purpose.
The name carries some of it too. Everybody who hears it reacts, and the reactions are graded. A bartender goes quiet, a mob boss swears in Russian at length, a young man asks who that is and gets told. The audience assembles a reputation entirely from other people’s faces.
The Dog Is a Structural Device
The dog gets mocked as a premise and the mockery misses what it is doing. Wick’s wife dies before the film starts, of illness, off screen, which gives the audience no antagonist to attach grief to.
So the film gives her a proxy. The puppy is her last decision, arriving after her death with a note, and killing it is an attack on the only remaining piece of her. The revenge is not about a dog. It is about the last thing she did being destroyed by somebody who could not be bothered to find out who he was robbing.
That is efficient construction. The audience needs a reason to accept two hours of killing from a protagonist with no other motive, and the film supplies one in about six minutes with almost no dialogue.
It also establishes the antagonist completely. Iosef is not a mastermind. He is a spoiled young man who broke something valuable out of boredom, and his father spends the film explaining to him what he has done, which is a far better dynamic than a villain with a plan.
When your protagonist’s loss happens before page one, you need a surviving object that carries it. Grief is not dramatic on its own. Grief attached to a thing that can be taken again is.
Make the object something the dead person chose. The puppy works because it is an act of will by someone no longer present, which means destroying it is a second death and the audience feels it as one.
Keep the inciting villain small. A petty antagonist who does not understand what he has disturbed generates more story than a competent one, because the escalation comes from other people reacting to his mistake.
Where the Middle Sags
After the church and the first Continental sequence, the film has a stretch with no forward pressure. Wick is captured, escapes, and the plot resets to approximately where it was.
The problem is structural. The revenge target is established in the first fifteen minutes and there is only one of him, so the second act has to invent obstacles between Wick and a man he could reach in an afternoon.
What it invents is quantity. More rooms, more men, a bathhouse, a nightclub. The sequences are well made and they are not advancing anything, which is why the film runs a tight hundred and one minutes and still feels like it pauses.
The sequels fix this by making the target the institution instead of a person, which gives Wick something inexhaustible to fight. That is why the second and fourth films are better structured and why this one is still the leanest.
Michael Nyqvist does a great deal to cover the gap. Viggo spends the film exasperated by his own son and openly admiring of the man coming to kill him, and every scene he is in has a texture the corridors do not. He is the reason the middle is watchable at all.
What It Changed
Twenty million dollars, eighty-six million back. Distributors had been dismissive of an action film from first-time directors with a star whose recent films had underperformed, and Lionsgate bought the rights two months before release.
The influence since is easy to see and easy to overstate. Wide framing and sustained takes are now standard in the better action films, and a generation of pictures has copied the surface, which is the neon and the coats and the assassin bureaucracy.
What gets copied less is the discipline that produced it. Stahelski and Leitch shot in New York on a tighter schedule specifically to get the city, having been told they could have more money and resources elsewhere. The constraint is the aesthetic.
By Chapter 4 the budget was a hundred million and the gross was four hundred and forty-seven. The franchise got bigger and the first film remains the one to study, because everything the series does later is visible here in its cheapest form.
A small budget forces the invention that a large one lets you skip. This film could not afford to hide a bad fight in editing, so it hired somebody who could stage a good one.
Imitators copy the surface because the surface is visible. The neon and the coins are easy. The four months of training and the refusal to cut are not, and they are what the film is made of.
If you are studying a work that succeeded, find the constraint it was working under. That constraint is usually the reason for every choice you admire.
Should you watch John Wick?
Yes, and watch the fights with attention to how rarely the camera cuts. This is a revenge picture with a thin plot and a hundred minutes of craft, and it is the clearest available demonstration that legibility is what makes action exciting.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 5 of my film lists