PREDICTING FUTURE BLOCKBUSTER franchises isn’t an exact science. Jon Favreau took a risk directing Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s pre-cultural dominance days; the Fast & Furious series has stubbornly hung around since 2001, a miracle for a movie adapted from a magazine article; the new slasher on the block, Terrifier, ascended to modern horror iconography from humble D.I.Y. beginnings. Then there are the franchises that weren’t, too, seeming slam-dunks that bounced off the rim, like 2011’s Green Lantern, and most post-Twilight YA movie adaptations: Beautiful Creatures, Mortal Instruments, Vampire Academy.
And then there’s John Wick, a revenge movie no one might’ve expected to flourish into a four-chapter and multi-spin-off enterprise. A man, his dead dog, a steamer trunk stuffed with gold coins and guns, and a nigh-inexhaustible supply of anonymous goons to dispatch; it’s a simple formula, it’s a silly formula, but it’s a successful formula in spite of, or maybe because of, that silly simplicity. John Wick doesn’t beg the audience to take it seriously. Instead, the film leaves that choice to the viewer and invites them to give the narrative a fair shake, no matter the peculiarity of the premise. What kind of stone cold button man goes on a tear through the criminal underworld, bent on doling out justice for his slain pooch? A rampage like that is usually reserved for one’s family members, not the family pet–even if the family pet is a parting gift from one’s late spouse.
Responses to John Wick’s marketing campaign boiled the movie down, sight unseen, to “Keanu Reeves avenges a dog,” which, though a more or less accurate summarization of the plot, sounds flimsy when divorced from its context. The dog, Daisy, isn’t just a dog; she’s like a stopper in a wine bottle, essential for preserving John’s (Reeves) humanity. Helen (Bridget Moynahan), his beloved wife, isn’t just the woman to whom he remains devoted even after her passing; she’s the person whose casual emergence in his life gave him a reason to get out of that life, hang up his Heckler & Kochs, and lead a boring, but far more fulfilling, existence. Even John’s Ford Mustang Mach 1, a legend among badass vintage cars, possesses deep meaning as Helen’s post-nuptials gift to him.
All of this is clarified in short order in John Wick’s 101 minute running time. When Iosef (Alfie Allen), the smug and craven failson of the ruthless Russian Pakhan Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), rolls the Mach 1 into a chop shop, he’s promptly refused service by its owner Aurelio (John Leguizamo), who, not the type to laugh at “dead dog” jokes, knocks Iosef to the floor with a mean right hook. It’s here that we start to appreciate the gravity of Iosef’s circumstances; the film calculates the full result of how screwed Iosef really is when, a mere few scenes later, Viggo slugs his dumbass son so hard that he pukes up his lunch. Suddenly, a plot that conceptually read as “silly” proves its sobriety; suddenly, John Wick showed us what kind of movie we were actually watching.
In John Wick, the fantasy is underpinned by EARNESTNESS and PALPABLE GRIEF, making it both a GREAT TIME at the movies and a HEARTBREAKER.
Director Chad Stahelski treats these cascading revelations straightforwardly, and not as “gotchas” for the viewer. This is partly why John Wick works both as a standalone picture and as the precursor to a growing franchise: sincerity. Not for one moment does the film feel like a self-satisfied bit, a movie cobbled together by way of MadLibs. It’s fantastical, of course, because so much action cinema is; one person annihilating a room full of hostile forces without tussling their hair is the height of make-believe. But in John Wick, the fantasy is underpinned by earnestness and palpable grief, making it both a great time at the movies and a heartbreaker.
The pairing of these qualities—high entertainment with high emotional stakes with a child’s understanding of what motivates an action hero–makes the film a one-of-a-kind experiment. Stahelski and screenwriter Derek Kolstad treat character beats with proper respect. There is surprise value baked into the movie’s DNA, but the brief belies its sincerity; no “surprise!” is intended by its production. Meanwhile, the only element of surprise John Wick’s sequels enjoy is the fact of being greenlit in the first place. Who would’ve thought back in 2014 that John Wick would make enough money to justify one sequel, to say nothing of three, plus a spin-off movie (2025’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerina), plus another spin-off in development that’s focused on Caine, Donnie Yen’s blind assassin in 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4, plus a TV series, The Continental: From the World of John Wick, to cap it all off?
Denying the influence the series has had on action cinema–American in particular, but not solely–is impossible. Movies ranging from Violent Night, to Kate, to Extraction and its 2023 sequel, to this year’s Monkey Man, owe a debt to John Wick’s style; that magic mixture of hyper-stylized aesthetics with gun-fu, sharp cuts, long takes, and intricate fight choreography gave mid-2010s studio action a much-needed shot in the arm. But what makes John Wick special is what also makes it an outlier even in context with its sequels. The film’s look and feel can be replicated; the rich payoff to its sappy-on-paper inciting incident can’t. All Stahelski can do with each passing film is up the ante in fight sequences and include a series of increasingly inspired casting choices.
Frankly, that’s enough. Littering the sequels with actors like Halle Berry, Clancy Brown, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Scott Adkins (wearing a fat suit and speaking in a German accent), Yen, Rina Sawayama, Mark Dacascos, Cecep Arif Rahman, and Yayan Ruhian, all while architecting brand new ways for John to obliterate faceless henchmen, distinguishes each new entry from the last. There’s a reason these films have been, and will continue to be, copied: the action itself, kept reliably fresh through tweaks made to the original recipe. But the reason that action alone is what John Wick’s successors take away from it is the first film’s inimitability. Hiring Reeves, who hadn’t had a box office hit since 2008 at the time of John Wick’s release, to play the lead in a “contract on the hitman” production based on the “lost pet grievance” trope, feels like a stroke of genius today, and felt audacious back in 2014. That audacity, even more than its effect on the action genre, is John Wick’s ultimate legacy.
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