"John Wick" Film Review

     After taking a few weeks off to focus more on schoolwork and chill from the film reviews for a bit, I felt it was necessary to finally get around to reviewing two movies that I have seen recently. The films I will be reviewing today are John Wick and A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010), with one of them being great and the other being terrible. So first, I will look at John Wick. 

     Walking into this movie, I was interested enough by the trailer to see if Keanu Reeves would manage to bring himself back into the public eye considering that his career has mainly been surviving on indie films and box-office bombs ever since the Matrix trilogy ended. And to my suprise, I was very entertained. I expected this to be a rip-off of Taken, and to be fair, the main story does consist of the main character being bent on vengeance, but it's in a slightly different context. The film focuses on a former hit man (Reeves), who retired to care for his dying wife. When she dies, he finds that she left behind a dog for him to care for, so that he would have something to love in her absence, but when John Wick encounters a few assholes at a gas station and refuses to sell off his car to them, they break into his house, beat the shit out of him and kill his dog. He then gets pulled back into the world he once belonged to as he searches for the men responsible, who happen to be connected to his former employer. 

     Say what you want about Reeves, but in this case, his slightly stiff acting actually works for the character. The fact that he was broken up from his wife's death was not beaten over the head of the audience, and I really appreciated that the director trusted the audience enough to not do a flashback. Apparently the director did not perceive the audience to be complete idiots, and this helped to keep a consistent flow for the movie and made everything a bit more realistic. The movie was very stylish but not in an overt manner, and it did not have the huge ego that would have made the experience annoying. The cinematography was decent, and overall the script did its job pretty well to present the conflict in both the inner and outer dimensions of the characters. It seemed to be paying an homage to a lot of classic action films, but insead of this being cheesy, it came off as pretty interesting. Overall I would say that I was impressed with this movie and it made for a refreshing break from the other crap that has been coming out recently. 

Overall rating: 9/10