John Wick is a pretty hackneyed movie in just about every aspect. There is absolutely nothing in this film that is unfamiliar or surprising, but it has ONE unexpected ace up its sleeve...
The plot is simplicity itself. Keanu Reeves plays John Wick, a very rich guy who recently lost his wife and is in deep mourning. His wife, knowing so was dying, gives him a puppy as a gift to help him with his grief. Of course, the puppy is so adorable, they become inseparable. A few days later, some young Russian mobsters straight out of central casting ask to buy his car, which he refuses. They visit him that night at home and nearly beat him to death, steal his car, and to show off how truly dastardly they are, kill his dog. What they don't know until their boss tells them later, is that John Wick is not only a retired hitman, but he is the hitman you hire to kill the boogeyman when he is on your tail. Unsurprisingly, John Wick comes out of retirement and goes on a kill-crazy rampage, seemingly single-handedly wiping out the entire Russian mafia in what we presume is New York.
This is the Hollywood movie that pulls every safe cliche out of the book. The bad guys are white, mafia, eastern-Europeans (as if there are no other bad guys in the world). These bad guys have the blackest of black morality, caring nothing for anything. Everyone dresses in hitman chic, dark gray or black suits. They are fodder for the good guy hitman(!), who gets hurt just enough to show he is human, but can still go on. The bad guy is at his heart a coward. There is even an assassin's guild of sorts, a shadowy organization that has its own rules of conduct and even owns a hotel for when these guys are on jobs. Aside from the fact it seems like a twelve-year-old wrote the script, I just, for some inexplicable reason, cannot buy Keanu Reeves as a badass. While I don't think I heard a single "whoa" in the whole movie, he just does not come off as the meanest killer out there. He seems like Ted grew up, put on a suit and gun and somehow blunders his way through the bad guys.
However, it has ONE big trick up its sleeve that saves it from absolute mediocrity; it's style. This is one of the most stylistic movies I have seen in a long time, turning a drab, dumb movie into one of the more visually interesting films I have seen in years. It is told so bombastically, with such enthusiasm, it transcends the stupidity of its source material and makes every shot a sight to behold. Directors Chad Stahelski and David Weitch are to be commended for making such an excitingly beautiful work out of such a drab turd of a script. These guys should be directing much better material than this dreck. Their style is a unique combination of Martin Scorsese's camerawork with Michael Mann's eye for atmosphere, color and mood. It's as if Drive met Die Hard. The visuals were so good that it pulled me out of the stupidity of the story and left me rapt. That's why it is 2.5 stars, better than average. The excellent visuals weighed down by a stupid story.
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