No stars (turkey). Rated R, for relentlessly strong, bloody and gory violence, profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang
Vile, reprehensible trash.
Ineptly scripted, badly directed
and atrociously acted by the name “star” — Keanu Reeves — who, as one of this
tawdry turkey’s executive producers, likely is the only reason it got made in
the first place.
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| Having reached this point in his vengeance-fueled crusade, Wick (Keanu Reeves) hasn't killed anybody for at least 5 seconds ... so it must be time to shoot another nameless thug in the face. Wick does that a lot, to rapidly diminishing returns. |
The fact that Reeves keeps
getting assignments remains a source of amazement; he can’t emote a lick.
Indeed, he makes Clint Eastwood look like Laurence Olivier. Reeves lucked into
two popular genre franchises awhile back, Speed
and the Matrix trilogy, which granted
the illusion of A-list credibility.
But everything else he has
touched in the past 20 years has bombed, in most cases with ample cause.
Really, now ... have you even heard of Hard
Ball, Ellie Parker, Thumbsucker, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Generation
Um... or Man of Tai Chi, let
alone had the opportunity to actually watch them? Could anything have been
worse that his laughably pathetic efforts at romantic leads, in A Walk in the Clouds or the ill-advised
remake of Sweet November?
Is it perhaps time to wonder how
much better both Speed and the Matrix
movies might have been, with a better lead actor?
Reeves never offers anything
beyond a grim scowl apparently intended to convey a wealth of emotion. Far from
it; he simply seems smug and contemptuous ... and not necessarily within the parameters
of the part he’s playing. It looks, sounds and feels more like a deliberate absence of acting: a smirky sense of
superiority, as if he’s delighted to once again make a pot of money for doing
no work whatsoever.
I’m not sure which would be
worse: that Reeves knows he has scant talent, and keeps trying to fool us into
believing otherwise ... or that he truly has no talent at all, but has failed
to recognize as much. Still. All these years later.
He also needs to wash his hair
more often. And get a better style to begin with.
Sadly, when it comes to no-talent
behavior, Reeves has plenty of company in this revolting excuse for a revenge
thriller. John Wick is “directed” —
and I employ the term in the loosest possible sense — by David Leitch and Chad
Stahelski, both of whom have impressively long Hollywood résumés ... as stunt
and action coordinators.
Leitch and Stahelski apparently
believed that they had learned something, operating under the guidance of other
directors for the past two decades.
They believed incorrectly.
Some movies signal their
gawdawfulness from the first scene; John
Wick is just such a disaster. Our protagonist — that would be Reeves, as
the title character — stumbles out of a vehicle, apparently mortally wounded,
and uses blood-smeared fingers to swipe his smart phone to a familiar video.
The image of his True Love (Bridget Moynahan, in the most thankless role I’ve
seen in awhile) speaks to him again, from some sunny, long-ago afternoon.
Reeves responds with a look that
suggests constipation.
And then, whoop, we cut away to some other time, some other place, as a hale
and hearty Wick wakens on an average morning. Yes, the whole movie to come is a
flashback, although Leitch, Stahelski and scripter Derek Kolstad don’t really
make that clear. And the prologue “tease” is a tired, clumsy cliché that should
have been retired decades ago.
We’re then treated to a lengthy,
poorly constructed montage: stitched together with bad edits and camera angles
that defeat themselves by (for example) cutting across the axis ... a rookie
mistake that inevitably disorients viewers, even if they couldn’t explain why.
Actual exposition is absent,
because nobody says anything.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Constant
Companion muttered to me, at about this moment, “and Reeves won’t talk during
the entire film.”
Nice thought, but no; not quite.
Back-story, of a sort, comes
slowly. Wick is a retired hit man who once worked for Viggo Tarasov (Michael
Nyqvist, remembered from much better work in the original Girl with a Dragon Tattoo trilogy), a brutal Russian mobster who
nonetheless feared his assassin’s devotion to duty.
“John Wick,” Tarasov says to an
associate at one point, and thus to us, “is the Boogeyman.”
This verbal explanation is
accompanied by on-screen text — think redundant subtitles, since everybody speaks
English — that punctuates certain words with larger, different-colored fonts. I
loathed this gimmick when director Tony Scott debuted it in the 2004 Denzel
Washington thriller, Man on Fire, and
it’s just as obnoxious here.
At random moments throughout John Wick, for no particular reason, a
character’s dialogue is accompanied by this on-screen text. The intended
effect, I’ve no doubt, is dramatic emphasis: PAY ATTENTION TO THIS LINE.
The actual result is irritation.
Indeed, Leitch and Stahelski do everything possible, at all times, to make
watching their film an unpleasant experience, above and beyond the stupid
script and leaden, deadened “acting.”
But I digress.
Wick was lucky; he found True
Love and successfully escaped the life. (One does wonder what, if anything, he
told his True Love. Needless to say, this script doesn’t bother to address
that.) But, alas, fate was unkind; she died. Now he’s alone, going through the
motions, trying to find a reason for getting up each morning.
He gets one, thanks to a chance
encounter with three thugs who follow him home, beat him up, steal his beloved
1969 Mustang and ... do something even worse. Much worse. Drive-people-from-the-theater-in-disgust worse.
Wick easily learns the identify
of his attackers, and discovers that — oh, dear — the primary thug is Tarasov’s
son, Iosef (Alfie Allen, playing the same sort of smarmy worm he has turned
into a minor career, as Theon Greyjoy in Game
of Thrones). Iosef didn’t know who he was mugging; it’s just a bad
coincidence.
Tarasov, recognizing what’s
likely to happen next, tries a “boys will be boys” approach with Wick. No dice.
Wick wants Iosef’s head on a plate; Tarasov won’t deliver. Cue the next 85
minutes of senseless mayhem and slaughter.
Which immediately begs the
obvious question: If Wick is as accomplished a killer as this film relentlessly
insists — his blazing guns exploding enemy heads like so many overripe cantaloupes
— then why were Iosef and his two friends able to get the drop on him so
easily, in the first place?
Anyway...
The subsequent havoc expands to
involve Marcus (Willem Dafoe), also a career assassin whose preferred weapon is
a sniper rifle; and Ms. Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), a sexy killer who may have
some history with Wick, but now relishes the opportunity to take him out.
What follows is repetitious in
the extreme: tedious, offensive and meaningless. Really, how many times can we
watch goons get shot in the face? By Leitch and Stahelski’s standards, the
answer would appear to be “Several hundred.” And no, I’m not exaggerating.
The few brief times Wick isn’t
slaughtering people, he and Tarasov exchange banal philosophical blather about
how they’re two of a kind: the sort of risible bad-guy dialogue that recently
sank Cormac McCarthy’s ludicrous script for The Counselor, and sounds just as ridiculous here.
I’ll credit Kolstad’s script with
one clever element: The Continental, an ultra-posh hotel at the heart of New
York’s underworld, where deals and contacts can be made, but civility must be
maintained. Bad behavior — i.e. assaults ’n’ killings ’n’ stuff — must be taken
outside. The place is run by Winston (Ian McShane), with Lance Reddick making a
strong impression as the manager, who goes by the name Charon (a nice nod to
Greek mythology).
McShane, Reddick and the whole
concept of The Continental are way cool ... but they’re utterly wasted amid the
rest of this dreck.
Finally, the greatest irony: Previous
experience would suggest that, if nothing else, Leitch and Stahelski would
deliver a boatload of great action sequences. Not hardly. Reeves — and his
stunt double — jump and bounce a lot, but most of the melees are standard-issue
running and shooting, neither special nor the slightest bit entertaining for
their own sake. They’re also mostly executed at night, or in darkened settings,
so it’s impossible to see, let alone appreciate, whatever smooth moves might
have been choreographed.
This pathetic excuse for a movie
deserves to be screened in only one setting: film school classes, as a warning against
everything one should not do.
John Wick may not be the worst movie
Hollywood unleashes this decade ... but it’ll do until that one comes along.
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