February 14: John Wick (2014 – Chad Stahelski [& David Leitch])

★★★

John Wick starts like Sunset Boulevard – a beat-up John tumbles out of a car and looks at cellphone image of his wife.  Flashback, we’re at his house. Flashback further, he’s in a hospital with her ill.  Flashback further, she admires an anniversary bracelet.  Within seconds, the film has taken us into four different times and told us where it’s going.  This fast information dump pulls us into the film and has us quickly engaged in puzzling out the links between all these facts.   The rapid opening also points to the film’s major goal, keeping the audience engaged.

It’s a smart move to use a narrative device in the opening because the film is all engagement through visuals and action from this point forward.  John Woo is much in the background, from direct references like a canted, low-angle shot looking up the barrel of Wick’s pistol to the exaggerated violence, which is excessive, stylized and choreographed until it's no longer violence but elegant performance.  The cinematography keeps our eyes busy, too.  The camera glides through long action sequences that can occur in neo-noir exteriors or in interiors filled with reflecting or opaque surfaces that distort what we see.  As dies the heavily-tinted lighting.  In one tour de force segment, Wick goes to a dance club to kill Iosef Tarasov, and the body count mounts as Wick and his enemies pirouette though the fight, shooting and hitting each other to the rhythm of the music.  It’s a bravura moment of film-making.

John Wick keeps us off-balance in several ways, too, which also holds our attention.  The violence here can be sudden and intense, like the fight that includes a puppy being killed, and we stay riven lest we miss something that might come at us suddenly.  There’s harsh, bloody one-one-violence, sudden fights, and a bit of suspense as we try to figure out Marcus’ role.  Stahelski varies the pace of the film, too, which breaks us out of the complacency of our expectations and makes us watch what’s going on.  After the several long action sequences that precede it, we expect Wick’s final attack on Iosef’s safe house to follow the same pattern.  Instead, Stahelski edits the entire sequence into a matter of seconds, and we see Wick’s quick revenge from long distance.

As is typical of this type of film, the hyper-stylization and focus on surface doesn’t allow for heart. Any psychology here is decoration, and John Wick presents its characters as figures for the action. The performances in the film create ironic distance with actors delivering their stilted lines in a deadpan manner.  In a conversation at the funeral for Wick’s wife, for example, the newly-widowed husband talks briefly with his friend Marcus in several short lines delivered in a monotone.  Even the humor, like Avi’s constantly asking his clients to speak English, is mostly ironic and distances the viewer.

John Wick is indeed all flash and no soul, but its flash is terrifically engaging.  This is a fun film to spend time with and marvel at the art and creativity behind its dazzling surface.