John Wick is the definitive movie about shooting people in the head. I tried and failed to think of another movie where the hero is more prolific at such a task. John Wick takes what should be a mindless, brainless act from games like Call of Duty or Battlefield and turns it into a bloody melody of movie magic.
Halfway into the movie, I wished I’d counted how many headshots he scored. I considered watching it a second time just to count them all. Luckily for me, somebody already did that. And they did it in an amazing way, with cool images and even a scoreboard. Thank you, internet, because truthfully, I didn’t want to count all of those headshots.
But why does he shoot so many people in the head? Because Iosef killed his puppy, stole his Mustang, and otherwise just acted a fool. Although Iosef is clearly a terrible human, I suppose we’re lucky he did what he did. Because thus, the movie John Wick was born.
One of the best things about this movie can only be captured on the first watch. It’s the is the path of discovery, where we slowly learn that John Wick is not normal.
At first, he’s a guy who lost his wife. Then he’s a guy who knows how to speak Russian. It turns out, he happens to know someone who deals in stolen cars. Later, we find out he killed three men with a pencil. Then we learn he’s the guy who killed the boogie man. And by the way, the cops don’t mess with him. By the end of this chain of discoveries, we now know who John Wick is, and the story commences to be a medley of bullets, headshots, and carnage where Wick leaves a trail of dead Russian mobsters behind him and somehow makes us want even more of it.
There’s not much brains in John Wick, probably because he splattered them all over the ground. But in truth, no one watches John Wick for the intellectual stimulation. We watch John Wick because we want to see how a trained assassin handles Russian thugs like Iosef. I don’t own a Mustang or a puppy, but if I did, and if someone decided to mess with either of them, I’d want to be able to handle it with the same level of virtue and grace as our man, the trained assassin and overall baddie, John Wick.
Leave a Reply