{"id":2367,"date":"2014-10-28T11:38:11","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T18:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/?p=2367"},"modified":"2014-10-28T11:38:11","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T18:38:11","slug":"john-wick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/2014\/10\/28\/john-wick\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wick"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"John<\/a><\/p>\n

Directed by: David Leitch, Chad Stahelski
\nStarring: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe, Dean Winters, Adrianne Palicki
\nRated: R for strong and bloody violence throughout, language and brief drug use<\/p>\n

The first warning sign \u201cJohn Wick\u201d gives us is that there was very, very little publicity about it. Your humble reviewer sees several movies a month, plus previews, and saw nary a single preview for Keanu Reeves\u2019 latest vehicle. The second, of course, is that Reeves is in it. He\u2019s not untalented, but he definitely has trouble picking quality movies on anything resembling a regular basis.<\/p>\n

The two together should have been enough to warn even a person who enjoys bad movies for how bad they are to stay away. Sadly, it was not.<\/p>\n

\u201cJohn Wick\u201d is a disappointingly standard revenge movie. We get to hear characters say variations on \u201chis wife died, then you killed his dog and stole his car\u201d repeatedly, in case we left the theater to get more popcorn and forgot what happened in the first act of the film. Bad things happen to John (and to the puppy given to him by his late wife \u2013 if you don\u2019t like movies where pets are killed just barely off screen, steer clear). Wick is out to track down and destroy the people responsible. Along the way, we meet people who remember him from before he left his life as a hit man \u2013 fellow killers, mob bosses, owners of criminal establishments, and so on. He\u2019s able to call on his old friends to help him in his mission.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of things that make \u201cJohn Wick\u201d bad (starting with whether our hero is named John or Jon, the latter being short for Jonathan), but the one that ties them all together is its complete lack of humor about itself. There\u2019s a teeny bit of scenery-chewing (from Reeves, even, which is startling), and one character who finally displays some awareness of how ridiculous the story is near the end of the film, but that\u2019s it. Everything else is deadly serious. Reeves is very good at making serious faces and delivering lines in a tone that can be interpreted as controlled anger, so this works for him, but everything about the movie is so ridiculous that making it serious has the same effect as making a superhero movie serious. Unless you\u2019re a genius, it just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

\u201cJohn Wick\u201d is not the work of a genius.<\/p>\n

The cinematography, soundtrack, and acting are, for the most part, competent and workmanlike. The fight choreography is actually surprisingly good considering the rest of the film \u2013 likely because the two directors have extensive filmographies as stuntmen and stunt coordinators. This is their first feature film, and it shows.<\/p>\n

Whether \u201cJohn Wick\u201d is worth your time and money depends on whether you enjoy this particular genre of films and whether you enjoy grim\/dark movies. Also, if you\u2019re the kind of person who cringes as soon as a main character gets a pet because you\u2019re bracing for it to be hurt as a plot device, stay far away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first warning sign \u201cJohn Wick\u201d gives us is that there was very, very little publicity about it. Your humble reviewer sees several movies a month, plus previews, and saw nary a single preview for Keanu Reeves\u2019 latest vehicle. The second, of course, is that Reeves is in it. He\u2019s not untalented, but he definitely has trouble picking quality movies on anything resembling a regular basis.<\/p>\n

The two together should have been enough to warn even a person who enjoys bad movies for how bad they are to stay away. Sadly, it was not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[99,100,92],"class_list":["post-2367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-awful","tag-fridging","tag-rated-r"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/John-Wick.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2oSX4-Cb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2369,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions\/2369"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}