John Wick – mindless action fun

I think I’m a little late to the party on this one and I guess it must have cost me.  I’m an action-movie fan.  I grew up in the Arnie/Sly era of the eighties and I have plenty of mindless action flicks in my DVD collection – everything from ‘Commando’ to the mode recent ‘Shoot ‘em Up’ pleases me to a degree and Keanu Reeves pops up a fair times in my watchlist.  However, somehow his film where he plays the titular ‘John Wick’ slipped past me.  I’ve only just seen it after its sequel was released and, during that time, I’ve seen many a positive review saying how great it was.  Therefore, by the time I got round to watching it, my hopes were high.

I guess what happened is the reverse of when I watched ‘Sex Tape’ and the big screen adaptation of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’ Both had been absolutely slated by the critics so my expectations were suitably lowered by the time I saw them.  And, weirdly enough, I actually took some small amount of entertainment in both!  I’m not saying either were particularly good, but enjoyable enough if you were in the right mood.  This time, my hopes were so high, I found that what I got didn’t really live up to what I was expecting.  I was waiting for something truly revolutionary and different from anything I’d seen before.  What I got felt like just another action movie.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not bad.  It was enjoyable enough, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before.  John Wick is a retired hitman who’s forced out of retirement when a baddie (played by 'Game of Throne's' Alfie Allen) kills his dog.  Yes, that’s basically the catalyst and motivation for the entire film.  What follows is your average (and I deliberately use the word ‘average’) rollercoaster of violence and revenge.  Everything you’d expect is there: gunfights are plentiful, there’s at least one car chase, a betrayal and eventually Wick comes face to face with the evil head honcho.  So it’s all there.  And it’s well done.  The violence (and there is violence – no PG13 here!) is believable and gritty and Keanu Reeves is always fun to watch (even when he’s trying to be moody and miserable he’s still that long-haired ‘bogus’ surfer-dude we all fell in love with back in the early nineties).  So, I can see how there’s much going for it.  I was just expecting more.  And that’s a shame really because my hopes were so high that, even though everything I like was – technically – there, I still came away with the feeling like it wasn’t that much of a big deal.  But, like I said earlier, a sequel has been made and I will definitely watch that, too.

At the end of the day, this film may not have entirely clicked with me, but I’m glad that Keanu Reeves is back in a decent franchise and it puts him back in the spotlight – maybe John Wick can team up with Liam Neeson in a Wick/Taken crossover? ;o)

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that