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Has anyone seen John Wick? I heard it's very good.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Has anyone seen John Wick? I heard it's very good.

While still falling victim to some action movie cliches (he can hit every bad guy with one shot except the one he's really trying to kill, etc), it's a pretty fun, pretty tight romp. The action is well choreographed & shot, not falling victim to shakycam & hyperkinetic editing. Some fun supporting performances (although after watching 30 Rock, I cannot accept Dean Winters in the semi-serious role he has, imagining every line ending with "dummy"). There's a moment in the film where Reeves gives the most intense performance I've ever seen from him.

PfR73 wrote:, I cannot accept Dean Winters in the semi-serious role he has, imagining every line ending with "dummy").

Or State Farm commercials.

He will always be Ryan O'Reily to me

Pretty much any actor from Oz will be that character in my mind forever. The idea that Verne Schillinger could get nominated for an Oscar is thrilling.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Has anyone seen John Wick? I heard it's very good.

I thought it dropped off in the 2nd half. A revenge film should be more satisfying when the biggest fish go down, but I found both of the most notable deaths rather anticlimactic in the way they were staged. Still a good film, just not a great one. A lot of fun.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Has anyone seen John Wick? I heard it's very good.

I just got a chance to catch it today; I thought it was really fun. It was nice to see Keanu kicking some ass on the big screen again, I'm sure if I was in my high school days I would've loved it. It does slow down a bit towards the end but it was still enjoyable.

I agree that it doesn't quite muster enough ingenuity and style to reach a level above "good for what it is"; I wish that the underground assassin economy/social structure had been more central to the main plot and less a kind of sideshow to the revenge action.

As funny as the relentless murdering became as it continued, it would actually have helped the action sequences to remove maybe 20-30 of Keanu's kills; the monotony of some of the shooting sequences undermines the terrific physical choreography and, as mfunk mentioned, limits the significance of the main villian's deaths.

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I liked the part where the Russian mob chief indicated he was going to chop up Mr. Peanuts M&M and sprinkle him on his ice-cream. Mr. Peanuts' double-take was classic.

Well ... that mostly lived up to the hype. While I'm not much of an action film aficionado, I can still understand the pleasures to be had in well choreographed gunplay.

And while I've seen recently well reviewed films like Drug War and The Raid, they either felt too stagey or too similar to Mann's Heat (which I'm not all that fond of).

I found John Wick to be mostly enormously entertaining, spectacularly choreographed and knowingly hilarious.

I have to agree that the last half hour did bring a dip in its pleasures. Yes, the big bad guys were too easily dispatched and it undercut the enjoyment by asking us to take evil seriously with Defoe's outcome. Also, the shots of the women in the bath house weren't necessary.

But overall a lot of fun.

Just one question: how did Wick make the cars explode by clicking the remote button? Did I miss something?

I pretty much agree with DarkImbecile. The economy of exposition and the imaginative world-building was what made this film really stand out for me and I wished both had been pushed further. I also enjoyed the way that even some of the minor characters had surprisingly decent and not necessarily obvious arcs. Peter Labuza's podcast The Cinephiliacs -- well worth listening to in general -- was what made me want to seek out this film, as he talked it up in his 2014 year end wrap-up. In addition to praising the film for trusting the viewers with its comparatively terse exposition, he noted the shoot-outs' relative fidelity to bullet counts, to squibbing exit wounds, to representing ricochets and following the ultimate trajectories of through-and-through bullets.

Soderbergh already showed us how alien fight sequences appear when filmed objectively in Haywire, and while it was an interesting experiment, it didn't need to be revisited, especially not by a film with far less going for it like this. This is an empty and useless collection of video game sequences, with the gunplay too fast and weirdly maneuvered into an uncanny valley of violence, replete with CGI blood everywhere. Things often happen quickly in the film, but rarely are they exciting or engaging or of any interest. It's literally like watching someone else play a video game (the characters exchange gold tokens, for Christ's sake), and about as entertaining. There's a fine collection of supporting actors here who show up for a day or two's work, but this is an artless, digitally-overmanipulated, and soulless endeavor that is patently ridiculous in every sense and yet takes itself stone-face serious. This kills any potential enjoyment to be gained from the whole endeavor. I think it's telling that Willem Dafoe is briefly on hand, because this film's inability to understand what makes a Tarantino film work and its hyper-violence and bizarrely underrealized criminal underground "world building" shares much in common with the Boondock Saints, and that both films now have rabid cult audiences of eternal teenagers is sadly not surprising. John Wick is the ultimate juvenile film experience, empty and flashy and self-important in ways it never earns. It may have been goofy fun on paper, but the filmed execution is not merciful.

I enjoyed the first one but the sequel didn't add much other than the additional bullet fodder. When you're seeing these films you sort of go in forgiving character development, coherent plotlines, and clever dialogue in exchange for spectacular action sequences -and they failed to deliver on that front.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Thought the second film was a substantial improvement over the first, with some of the best violence choreography since Kill Bill: Vol. 1. It feels so much more confident, so much more settled - and the casting (Common, especially) works better than some of the choices in the first film. I can't wait to see it again, and I can't believe I'm saying that.

DarkImbecile wrote:I agree that it doesn't quite muster enough ingenuity and style to reach a level above "good for what it is"; I wish that the underground assassin economy/social structure had been more central to the main plot and less a kind of sideshow to the revenge action.

As funny as the relentless murdering became as it continued, it would actually have helped the action sequences to remove maybe 20-30 of Keanu's kills; the monotony of some of the shooting sequences undermines the terrific physical choreography and, as mfunk mentioned, limits the significance of the main villian's deaths.

That's what I wrote two and a half years ago about the original, and both issues I noted were addressed in the superior second film, just in different directions. On the one hand, John Wick: Chapter 2 played up the assassin shadow world and made its rules and machinations even more central to the plot, to the film's benefit

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(as with the very entertaining introduction of Laurence Fishburne's army of "homeless" lookouts and spies and the paranoia-fostering ubiquity of assassins in the final scenes).

On the other hand, the monotonous, almost metronomic sequences of Wick mowing down EVEN MORE dozens of men with shotguns, assault rifles, and handguns were the closest any film I've seen has come to the repetitious killing sprees of a video game - even more so than those movies that explicitly tried to replicate that experience. The choreography in these sequences makes them tolerable at worst, but they also make the action sequences doing something different stand out,

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as with the subway fight with Common, the pencil scene, etc.

This entry in the now-certain-to-continue franchise is still not great, but maybe now has reached a level above "good for what it is"; if the series proceeds on the same trend line, John Wick: Chapter 15 will basically be on par with The Godfather among organized crime films.

As an anecdotal aside, in my experience the difference between those fans of this type of movie who find these films "fine, but not much more" and those who really enjoy them are that the latter haven't seen The Raid or its sequel, which are the apotheosis of this type of action film, as far as I'm concerned.

DarkImbecile wrote:

DarkImbecile wrote: On the other hand, the monotonous, almost metronomic sequences of Wick mowing down EVEN MORE dozens of men with shotguns, assault rifles, and handguns were the closest any film I've seen has come to the repetitious killing sprees of a video game - even more so than those movies that explicitly tried to replicate that experience.

Have you seen the numbing, exhausting Hardcore Henry?

This thread is helpful for cementing what films to avoid in the future

beamish13 wrote:

DarkImbecile wrote:

DarkImbecile wrote: On the other hand, the monotonous, almost metronomic sequences of Wick mowing down EVEN MORE dozens of men with shotguns, assault rifles, and handguns were the closest any film I've seen has come to the repetitious killing sprees of a video game - even more so than those movies that explicitly tried to replicate that experience.

Have you seen the numbing, exhausting Hardcore Henry?

Just enough to know not to watch any more of it.

I think I'd call the choreography tolerable at best. Though the real painful part were all the jump cuts. Additionally, the slow-mos whenever characters crash through glass would've been better if it was meant to be an homage to cheesy 80s/90s action flicks. The film gave me a greater appreciation for John Woo and Michael Mann's shoot 'em ups.

mfunk9786 wrote:I disagree wholeheartedly. Thought the second film was a substantial improvement over the first, with some of the best violence choreography since Kill Bill: Vol. 1. It feels so much more confident, so much more settled - and the casting (Common, especially) works better than some of the choices in the first film. I can't wait to see it again, and I can't believe I'm saying that.

I agree completely. John Wick 2 was, for me, the best action film I've seen since Kill Bill: Vol. 1 just narrowly beating out The Raid films which I also loved. The choreography in the violence scenes were perfect, Reeves and his counter parts really took the fight scenes seriously, allowing for a lack of cutting during the fight scenes and a very authentic feel.

This is also probably the most fun movie I've seen in a long, long time. I can't remember another theatre experience where the whole theatre is yelling "ohhhh" "whoa" and "yes!" for almost the entire film. The dialogue and the story are pure cheeseball, but it felt utterly perfect for this film. The dialogue was very laughable but in a fun way, it seemed like a joke the filmmakers and Reeves were in on.

Common was great, probably delivering the strongest performance of the film and giving us some great fight scenes; I hope they bring him back for John Wick 3

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even though John Wick stabbed him in the heart

I agree completely with mfunk that the whole film felt so much more confident and settled.

I also can't wait to see it again - it is a blast

I was completely unaware of these films until about a week ago, when someone mentioned that John Wick 2 was worth checking out. I sat down and watched the first film and enjoyed it, then saw John Wick 2 at the cinema and, again, enjoyed it. These films are kept simple in their premise, but they deliver bigtime on action, unlike so many Hollywood films, which try to pretend to be something they are not, and then under-deliver on the action.

Apparently these films were directed by working stuntmen, which explains why the stunts and action scenes are so cracking. If you keep your expectations within reasonable boundaries, I think you can enjoy these films as a fun action vehicle.

I agree with the plaudits for Chapter 2. The gunplay choreography was a bit cleaner, and there was a bit more world-building that, while unrealistic, makes perfect sense for this franchise. I probably won't see it a second time, but it was a great technical exercise in pure action choreography.