Review: ‘John Wick’ has plenty of style making it a fun and crazy ride

Posted on November 7, 2014

By MARK VIOLA

Even when a movie is all style with almost no substance, however, it can still be a rocking good time. That is the case with “John Wick,” a shoot ‘em up action flick starring Keanu Reeves in his best role in about a decade. Story-wise, the movie gives us nothing that we haven’t seen before a hundred times–some of them several times in the last month alone–but once the action kicks off, it never lets up and is just so fun, so wild and so cool, that you can’t help but enjoy the ride. This was the most fun I’ve had in an action movie is quite some time.

The movie follows John Wick, a retired hitman who for the past five years has been out of the game, living a quiet, ordinary life with his wife. But fate seems to have other things in mind, as when we meet John, his wife has just succumbed to a fatal disease, leaving him once again alone. Knowing he would be lost after her death, his wife posthumously sends him a puppy, and he thinks life may go on after all. But that too is taken from him after a chance encounter with a mobster’s son, Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen, “Game of Thrones”), leaving him right back in the darkness. Only now, he has a target for his anger.

“John Wick” quickly establishes a sense of style, and runs with it, letting it permeate every aspect of the film. In that way, it is like “Kill Bill,” which admittedly is the vastly superior film. But both films used style to make their storytelling unique, and here, we have a run-of-the-mill revenge flick turned into one of the most entertaining movies I’ve seen since “Guardian of the Galaxies.”

Sure, there may not be much substance underneath the style in “John Wick,” but when the style is as fun as it is here, it really doesn’t matter.

The film is rated R for strong and bloody violence throughout, language and brief drug use.

(This is a shortened version of the full review available in our printed or e-edition papers.)

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