With that done, Viggo held up his part of the bargain and John was a free man.
In order to get out of the business he did the impossible and essentially laid the groundwork for the criminal empire of Michael Nyqvist’s Viggo. Usually in these films, the assassin finds themselves on the outs with their employers after being given a job that they found to be too much for their moral code. I’m something of a self-made expert on assassins on film, and one of the things I loved most about this film is that it takes the most common topos of the genre and twists it around. There are no side stories that don’t immediately work their way back into the main narrative, and every twist has a solid payoff. By keeping the script simple and fairly linear, Jo hn Wick is able to really concentrate on the action, which serves to keep the film moving forward smoothly and quickly with a laser-like persistence.
Until Alfie Allen breaks into his home, beats John senseless, kills his puppy, and steals his muscle car.Īnd with that, admittedly sappy set-up, John Wick is off to the races in what is a virtually non-stop exercise in pure cinematic mayhem. Once the deadliest assassin of them all, Wick has retired to live a quiet life until his wife dies, leaving him alone with his grief, the puppy she left him, and his muscle car. Even Kevin Nash and The Wire‘s Clarke Peters make brief but memorable appearances. The cast is filled to brimming with brilliant cameos, including Willem Dafoe as John’s best friend Marcus, Adrianne Palicki as a rival assassin with eyes on the John Wick prize, John Leguizamo as a chop-shop owner who knows what’s what, Lance Reddick as the Hotel Manager where all the assassins in NY hang out while in town, Alfie Allen as the sorry dipshit who sets everything in motion because he has no impulse control, Michael Nyqvist as his father, who immediately has to decide whether or not to simply give his son up to his fate or fight it, and my favorite, Ian McShane as the man in charge, the man who maintains the rules, the man who balances the scales. The action is slickly edited and magnificently choreographed - which should come as no surprise given the directors are the top fight choreographers in Hollywood. Stylistically, John Wick is a hyper-real dive into the deep end of world of assassins and criminal empires. Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch hit all of those points in John Wick but then take it up a notch by also incorporating Judo, Gun-Fu, and even Car-Fu before everything is said and done. Writer/Director John Hyams committed fully to making the action in that film as brutal and realistic as possible, loading the cast with MMA fighters and focusing on bloody hand-to-hand beatdowns. The last time I was as impressed with an action film was Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning - which if you still haven’t seen, you need to fix that as soon as possible. Now, the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film is imminent and I’m here to once again tell you to go watch this freaking movie. Then, just last week, I listed it as one of the Top Ten Crime Thrillers of 2014. Back in November, when John Wick was in the theaters, our very own Alex Wolfe gave the film a glowing review.
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