John Wick

Even though my buddy won't admit it publicly, I know for a fact that deep down inside he really wants to be Keanu Reeves. And I don't mean Neo or even Johnny Utah Keanu, I mean he wants to be the real Keanu; a guy who's really not that great at his job but still gets a lot of money and love for doing it anyway. All he would have to do in his free time is be a bit of a recluse, learn how to surf, and play guitar in a terrible band named Dogstar. This actually sounds kind of money now that I'm typing it out. But I won't give him too hard of a time for this because there was a time when I wanted to be Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots. Yes I know he's white and on heroin but dude can sing and dance like a madman! I even came close to dying my hair blond once but then Sisqo all of a sudden became popular and that immediately killed that idea.

The point of all of this is that my buddy gets just a little too excited when Keanu comes out with a new movie; we were talking about John Wick for a full two months before it was released and there were amazing movies like Gone Girl, Fury, and The Equalizer that were all coming out before it hit the theaters. At first all I was expecting was a glorified B movie at best but then I started seeing all this buzz about it and my expectations started to soar. Well as my friend Larry David would say, curb your enthusiasm sir, curb your enthusiasm (yes, yes even I hated that joke).

Wick is basically an ultra-violent version of Dude! Where's My Car?. Wick is played by Keanu and the film opens up with him mourning the death of his wife. He apparently retired from the hitman game to enjoy his life with her but not long into their marriage she gets sick and dies of a disease that they don't really give you many details about. To help him cope with her death, his wife gives him one final gift in the form of a cute little puppy so that he will still have something to love in this world besides his badass car. The puppy grows on Wick and he finds himself immediately attached to it but one day as he is on his way to get food for the dog, he runs into these Russian gangsters, led by Iosef Tarasov (Game of Thrones' Alfie Allen). Iosef decides that he likes Wick's car and invades his home later that night to take it. In the process he and his gang rough up Wick and kill his dog. Obviously Wick doesn't take kindly to this and he decides to temporarily get back in the game to get revenge.

I have no problem with simplicity of the story because it reminded me of all the old school kung fu flicks that I used to watch as a drunken post college grad; "you killed my father, prepare to die!"; oh wait, that's Princess Bride. But still, that's all action flicks really needed back in the day, a simple reason for the protagonist to get revenge so they can go out and wreck shop on a bunch of scrubs; and that's exactly what Keanu does in this movie. I actually think he was just sitting around bored and was looking for an excuse to shoot people in the head because 90% of the deaths that occur are from his beating them senseless right before putting a bullet in their head. Actually the best death scene in the movie comes from him pulling a Russian gangster by his beard as he puts two, not one, but two bullets in his dome. I'm ashamed to say that that scene had me laughing out loud in the theater.

There were also a few additional nuggets on freshness that included a hotel for hitmen, a pseudo Staying Alive intro for Keanu as he enters a club to kill bad guys, and a pretty tight little clean up crew that looks like it was led by the dad from Frasier. But what was easily the freshest moment of the movie belonged to the terrible song they played right before each action scene which sounded like indie Nu-metal and had some clown singing "We got guns! We got guns! We only shoot strangers not the ones we love!" It's so awful that you can't help but love it.

What's not fresh is the fact that after all the time they spend building up how much of a badass Wick is, he kind of gets punked a lot in this movie. Outside of shooting people in the head, he doesn't really do anything all that fresh, and when you have a plot this simple you better make up for it with some over the top action scenes with your hero spouting out awesome one liners. "Yeah, well I'm taller!" Also, why include an awesome Russian bathhouse VIP club scene and have all of the girls wearing tops? We all know that in Mother Russia prostitutes don't even wear tops to their weddings, so there's no way in the world they'd wear them to entertain Russian mob bosses in a pool.

I liked this movie but didn't love it. In the end I got exactly what I expected from the outset, and that's a fairly entertaining B movie. I rate this movie as barely FRESH.