Genre: Action
Premise: John Wick is being hunted by every single assassin in the world. And John Wick on a horse.
About: John Wick didn’t just kill the 200 characters who came at him in Parabellum. He killed Avengers Endgame, dethroning the box office behemoth with a 57 million dollar opening, almost twice that of John Wick 2’s opening box office weekend.
Writers: Derek Kolstad and Shay Hatten and Chris Collins & Marc Abrams
Details: 130 minutes
I have to be careful with today’s review.
The John Wick franchise is one of the best underdog stories in cinema history. The first John Wick script was laughed at by Hollywood. It was about a retired assassin who went on a killing rampage because of a dog. It starred an over-the-hill former movie star who was in the process of joining Bruce Willis and Nicholas Cage in the direct-to-digital doldrums. The movie, a likely candidate for direct-to-digital itself, needed to have literally every single critic who saw it say it was awesome to get publicity. And even when the first film did well, it didn’t do well enough for a studio to think it was worthy of a wide-release sequel. Still, Lionsgate took a chance on a bigger sequel, and the box office results legitimized the franchise, ensuring that more sequels would be in the works. John Wick is the little engine that could. And a wonderful reminder that there are still popular projects that can be birthed from screenwriters’ imaginations.
With that said, here’s my beef. John Wick started out so good, I thought I was in the process of watching a classic. But then each fight scene became less interesting than the previous one, when it should’ve been the other way around.
If you haven’t seen the film, it continues where the last one left off. John Wick has killed an assassin inside the sacred confines of The Continental hotel, a huge no-no. It’s such a no-no, in fact, that John Wick becomes the number one bounty in the world, at 14 million dollars. Since it’s rare for a head to pay that much, every single assassin on the planet will be after him. I want you to remember that for later, as it’s a pivotal area the movie could’ve improved in.
Priority number 1 for John Wick is to get out of New York City, which isn’t easy. But he eventually gains passage to Casablanca of all places, where he reunites with an old assassin friend (Halle Berry and her dogs) and tries to convince some dude high up on this bonkers Wickian mythology ladder to get this price off his head. The guy tells him he’s got to meet some other guy who literally lives in the middle of the desert, who tells him if he wants this, he has to kill the head of the Continental, sending him right back to where he started. It’s here where Wick takes on a late-arriving villain who’s been dreaming his whole life of killing John Wick. Is it finally the end for the king of the double-tap?
Okay so look. John Wick has always been about two things. Wacky assassin mythology and fight choreography porn. You could legitimately argue that these are the only two things that exist in the franchise. However, you would also have to point out that it does both of them really well. The mythology, in particular, is so weird, that you can’t help but bask in it. I love these tatted up bounty order-taking nurses. I love how there are a dozen different sacred coins, all of which mean something unique to this assassin community. I love how every tenth person on the planet is an assassin waiting for John Wick to walk past them so he can start following him. I love the way-too-dramatic look on everybody’s faces when an order is called in to “deconsecrates” the Continental. I love that they gave the movie a title that three people in the world knew the definition of.
I absolutely loved John Wick killing a 7 foot man with a book, unofficially making the 300 year old author an accomplice. I loved John Wick using stable horses to kill assassins. I loved the “hallway of knives” fight. I even loved the motorcycle sword set piece, despite the fact that it felt like something we’ve seen before.
However, I didn’t like any of the fight scenes after that. I thought Halle Berry’s character was annoying – a classic case of a secondary character hating the main character for no other reason than to create conflict, not cause there was any actual organic reason. All of the dog choreography felt overtly staged, taking me out of the movie. And how many faceless bad guys does John Wick have to kill in a scene before it starts getting tiresome? The answer is 10. The movie thought the answer was 50.
Then Halle Berry just disappears, never to be heard from again. If they’re going to try that hard to spin off a new character, they might as well have admitted it. “I’ll see you again if the internet response is positive,” Berry should’ve left Wick with. Then Wick walks in a desert for no other reason than it looks cool to have a sharply dressed Keanu Reeves walk in a desert. This is where I started to lose faith in the film.
But what really bummed me out was that they went with beauty over ingenuity for the film’s climax. Having Wick fight three guys who I only found out afterwards were big action stars from another film in this glowing neon glass room that had zero reason to exist other than that it looked good on camera was disappointing. The whole reason I loved the library scene and the horse stable scene and the knife hallway scene is that Wick could use the unique environment to give us action scenarios we hadn’t seen before. The neon glass castle didn’t have any of that. And I suppose they could argue that they wanted the focus to be on the fight, not the gimmicky surroundings. But I didn’t have any idea who these rando guys were. And by that point, we’d seen John Wick punch and kick so many people, that any fight he was in now was going to look redundant.
The great thing about that library scene was how unique the opponent was. I figured, when they said that every assassin in the world was going to be after him, that we were going to get a couple of dozen unique characters like that, all of whom had different talents and fighting skills. Instead, they brought in every top Asian stunt man in the business and used them for Wick’s adversaries. I can’t figure out for the life of me why they didn’t give us more variety. I thought maybe they were saving the adjudicator (a tall short-haired woman) for a battle, which would’ve been cool. But nope. Nearly every bad guy he faced was similar.
And yet, I can’t get too mad at John Wick. If you love pure action, I don’t see how you can not love this movie. It’s only a tough watch for those who watch way too many movies like myself and who wouldn’t mind a little extra character development so we care more. Oh, and I love the fact that director Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves want to keep making John Wick movies til they die. I think that’s hilarious. In a world where snobby actors on hit shows and franchises are always ungratefully begging to get out of their contracts, it’s good to finally see two people who are like, “Nope, we’re good. We have no intention of stopping.”
But Reeves and Stahelski will have to watch out. If they get even a little bit lazy, this franchise could fall apart. Bring us whatever inspired the first half of John Wick 3 for future installments and I’ll happily make another reservation at the Continental.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A common screenwriting mistake is to get hung up on what you’re going to do in a scene and not be open to better ideas. John Wick 3 made a crucial mistake in one of its early scenes. John must go to an underground doctor to get a shoulder wound sewed up. The problem is, he’s only got 5 minutes before the bounty begins. The writers choose to use the scene to set up some plot. The doctor, an older Asian man, isn’t allowed to work on John once the bounty begins. So it’s a race against time to sew him up. Afterwards, they discuss what his plan is, which sets up the next sequence. — What they should’ve done instead is have the doctor work on him, giving John everything he’s got, cutting back and forth from the clock, time ticking down, time ticking down, time ticking down, and then, the SECOND we hit the top of the hour, the doctor should’ve switched from helper to killer, grabbing available weapons (which would’ve been fun in a doctor’s office) and trying to kill John to get the bounty. I think they were so locked in on making this an exposition scene that they didn’t see an obvious awesome scenario.
