John Wick (2014) Review
8/10
Official trailer
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 doesn’t 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’s 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.
What I feel watching John Wick is relief. Being able to see where everybody’s standing in a fight is a pleasure the choppy action of that era kept denying me, and Reeves doing the work himself makes every grapple feel earned. The middle drags enough to hold it at an 8, but the first act is about as tight as the genre gets.
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 an objection to how action was being shot. The convention by 2014 was rapid cutting and tight framing. That hides the actor 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 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’s 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 works 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. The reloads are my favorite detail in the whole film. I love watching a hero who has to count, because it turns every room into a little math problem I’m solving right alongside him.
Clarity is the precondition for excitement. Confusion produces noise, and bad action has trained audiences to read noise as intensity. That’s 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. That means you can’t cheat a character across a room, and the constraint improves the writing.
The World Is Built Out of Almost Nothing
There’s a hotel where violence is forbidden. There’s a currency of gold coins. There’s 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. That tells you there’s 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 name reactions tickle me most of all, especially the mob boss swearing at length in Russian. That’s the funniest moment in the picture for me, and it tells me more about Wick than any flashback could.
The Dog Is a Structural Device
The dog gets mocked as a premise and the mockery misses what it’s doing. Wick’s wife dies before the film starts, of illness, off screen. That 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’s an attack on the only remaining piece of her. The revenge is about the last thing she did being destroyed by somebody who couldn’t be bothered to find out who he was robbing.
That’s 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 a spoiled young man who broke something valuable out of boredom, and his father spends the film explaining to him what he’s done. That’s 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 holds it. Grief isn’t 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’s an act of will by someone no longer present. That means destroying it’s a second death and the audience feels it as one.
Keep the inciting villain small. A petty antagonist who doesn’t understand what he’s 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’s 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’re not advancing anything. That’s why the film runs a tight hundred and one minutes and still feels like it pauses.
The bathhouse and the nightclub lose me for a while. They’re well made, and I still catch myself checking the clock, because nothing in those rooms changes Wick’s problem. Losing one of them wouldn’t hurt a thing, and Viggo could’ve used the minutes.
The sequels fix this by making the target the institution instead of a person. That gives Wick something inexhaustible to fight. That’s 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’s in has a life the corridors don’t. He’s 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. That’s 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 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 couldn’t 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 aren’t, and they’re what the film is made of. If you’re 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. I give it an 8 because the fights are the clearest action of their decade and the world around them is built out of almost nothing. The two points come off for a middle that trades momentum for more rooms full of men. Watch how rarely the camera cuts, and you’ll see why the leanest entry in the series is still the one I’d hand to anybody new to it.
