John Wick: El Hombre de la Muerte
John Wick arrived in theaters in 2014 like a brilliant lightning bolt across a cloudless night sky. With the type of action scenes that would give a crash test dummy whiplash, Keanu Reeves returned to the forefront of action cinema like he was making up for lost time. Maybe he was….
Keanu’s first real success in the action genre was in 1991 with Point Break and he has done nothing but make a stellar career ever since with movies like Speed, The Matrix trilogy, Street Kings, and Man of Tai Chi. What has been missing for Keanu in the eyes of many non-action fanatics is the legacy effect. Sure, he’s made excellent action movies for three decades but they’ve been so spread out and low in number that many people forget that he’s a guy who is as committed as anyone to perfecting a character right down to his breathing style. Action cinema isn’t a cakewalk. Every movement tells a story. Every understated glare, each limping step towards the villain, and every single drop of sweat tells a tale that normally involves tragedy and triumph the likes that most of us will never know. Hopefully, anyways. Let’s think for a minute about John Wick.
John Wick uses any and everything to kill; guns, knives, cars, and pencils. You name it, he’s probably killed someone with it. The beauty of the action in the John Wick series to date has to do with the reasoning behind it. The first film dealt with loss in an extreme way. John had his car stolen and his dog killed which set him off into a murderous rampage. While that may be a little extreme in some eyes, the mental state that John was in (having just lost his wife) was basically searching for a reason to flip the switch and turn Wick into the devil that he had once been. John Wick’s comfort lies in taking lives. You could easily use the same words to describe his demeanor as you would for his favorite ammunition: cold, hard, steely. John Wick had piled up his loss of humanity like a pile of luggage in a closet, just waiting for someone to open the proverbial closet door and release the boogeyman from his slumber.
John Wick is a fantasy story. He’s man who knows so much loss but also one who has created so much loss. He’s a killer. While we only see him killing “bad” guys for the most part, he has lived a life committed to taking out anyone with a price on their head. You don’t get the “Boogeyman” title without offing a serious amount of people. What makes John Wick different from other movies about hitmen is that we meet John at a very unique moment in his life. A moment where he’s at his most human. He’s just lost his wife, the very woman who saved him from a life of killing. Now, his beloved car and puppy (a gift from his late wife) were ripped from his already decimated life and John retreats to what he knows; killing. When you start to connect the dots of the character of John Wick, he becomes a much more well-rounded man rather than just a boogeyman in the dark. He’s a guy with nothing but pain. His past is filled with pain and his present is nothing but loss so what if he gets shot a few times and gets stabbed in the leg. What can you take from a man with nothing?
John Wick 3 is coming. This series has changed the way that people think about Keanu Reeves and what his legacy is in the action world. We live in an age where older actors are far and away better at action than the younger folk. Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson, Nic Cage and Van Damme, the action stars of yesteryear haven’t stopped making excellent action movies but they’ll certainly have to make room for Keanu Reeves. John Wick has a smorgasbord of killing methods but we will have to wait till Chapter 3 to see if he has any chance at living. My guess is that it’ll all end in one giant, explosive ending. John Wick is more Grim Reaper than man, his short stint of happiness was an anomaly…he’s the man of death.
