John Wick - 2014

A really good action movie, I liked it, better than I was expecting. The shooting scenes were very good, not so much the hand-to-hand-fight scenes, those seemed a bit fake, kind of slow or far away, if you know what I mean, but there wasn’t a lot of them anyway. Most of the time Wick uses weapons.

It starts showing a wounded Keanu Reeves (but we don’t need a formal introduction to know that he’s the title character John). He looks at a video on his phone showing a happy moment with a woman, and the scene seems sad enough to make everyone understand that he lost her already, then he sort of faints. Next scene is clearly in the past, but we’re not told how long before it is.

John is in a beautiful house but all alone. He attends his wife’s funeral, and looks destroyed. At home, he receives the last gift from his wife: she was sick, she knew she was dying, and she arranged for this gift for him, with a card that said that she knew he would need to learn to love again, and a good way to start was with a puppy! John opens the dog carrier and takes with him a beautiful puppy called Daisy, so so adorable! He cares for Daisy, and that cheerful loving little thing is what he needs to keep going. 

One day he goes out with his car and stops for fuel. A Russian guy admires his old car, and asks him how much he wants for it. John replies that it’s not for sale, and we see that he understands and speaks Russian.

The Russian bully doesn’t take the no well, and when that night we hear the dog barking, getting up from their bed and running downstairs barking, we have no doubt, have we? John doesn’t think anything of it, though, he only thinks the dog needs to go outside, so when he comes downstairs he’s totally unprepared. The guys that he met before attack him now, steal his car, and what’s worse, they kill the little darling. That was painful! The next image is the saddest of all: a blood trail showing how the dog painfully moved towards him, to lay at his side. When John comes to, he mourns the death of Daisy :’(

The Russian guys took the car to their usual garage, where they always bring stolen cars, but Aurelio there (John Leguizamo) is upset on seeing the car; immediately he asks where it comes from, and when he learns that they beat up a guy to steal it, and killed his dog, he punches the guy Iosef (Alfie Allen) knowing very well that he’s the son of a boss, saying that he’ll understand… and yes, the scene most full of the right atmosphere is exactly that, when boss Viggo (Michael Nyqvist) calls Aurelio asking him if it’s true: “I heard you struck my son” - “yes sir I did” - “and may I ask why?” - “because he stole John Wick’s car, sir, and killed his dog” …. “Oh”. I think this is the first time we hear the full name, and seeing how the Russian mob boss reacts to the name makes you understand a lot of things. There isn’t really any need for more explanation, but Iosef is too stupid to understand things that are not very clearly explained to him, so Viggo explains that John Wick, called the Baba Yaga, was not the boogeyman, he was the guy you sent to kill the f.. boogeyman! 

Viggo knows that John will come after Iosef, so he arranges for every man available to go after John - well, they weren’t all that many, when Viggo told his man Avi (Dean Winters, Svu’s Cassidy) to send all his men (“how many do you have?) I expected more… either Avi didn’t take it too seriously, or he didn’t have that many men available…

It’s no surprise to see that John has weapons hidden in the house, he was an assassin after all. He left the job when he fell in love and got married, but now he needs his stuff again. When they come to his house, he kills them all. I got a little worried when a policeman (or a sheriff’s deputy, maybe it’s more correct, not sure) knocks at his house. They know each other by name, and I got a bit worried that he might have to kill an innocent cop that he had known for a while, but they surprised me here. It went like this: cop looks over John’s shoulder and sees a corpse on the floor, says: you back on the job? John replies: no, just a personal matter, or something like that. Cop says:ok I’ll leave you to it then, goodnight. John says goodnight Jimmy and closes the door… just like that… Ok, fine with me. 

Viggo uses all the men he has to protect his son (who doesn’t seem able to grasp the danger, that’s too much for his little spoiled brain) and also puts a two-million-dollars reward on his head. He also hires another skilled assassin, Marcus (Willem Dafoe). John takes a room at the Continental, which as we learn is a hotel - full of that kind of people - where rules are important, and is forbidden to do their ‘work’ in the hotel. A woman assassin, Perkins (Adrianne Palicki) is willing to break the rules, nothing seems to matter to her, she’s one of those ‘f.. the rules’-type :-/ She gets offered four millions to kill John inside the Continental, and she tries, but John had been woken up by Marcus with a shot on the pillow (did anyone here really believe that he missed? No, he wouldn’t have missed had he wanted to kill him!) and stops her. He doesn’t kill her, instead he offers another guy there that he knows, Harry (Clarke Peters) to babysit her for a while, for a coin (some golden, or gold coin that seem to be a special currency in their private world). Unfortunately, she frees herself and kills Harry right there in the room :-/ I was sorry to see that.. I mean, this is a movie with bad guys against bad guys, so the viewer is drawn to choose a side, which of course is the side of those with either a heart or at least a code, some honour left. This of course makes Iosef, Perkins and Viggo the villains, while Harry was one of those I liked. 

The hotel manager (Lance Reddick) apologizes to John for the inconvenience at the hotel with a car, and the owner Winston (Ian McShane) - I think he was the owner - gives him information about Iosef and Viggo.

John kills almost all the men protecting Iosef, but he manages to get away because John gets wounded (this actually happens before Perkins attacks him, right before a doctor at the Continental patched him up).

After that, he goes to the church that Perkins told him to be a cover for Viggo’s important operations, where he keeps not only money, but also important documents that he uses to blackmail powerful people. John kills a few men and sets the ‘vault’ on fire. During another shooting, Avi hits him with a car and he’s taken prisoner - not killed right away when he’s unconscious, maybe because Viggo is very pissed about the documents and  wants to shout at him, wants to know if it really had to come to this! John tells him that the dog was the final gift from his wife, and a chance for him to have hope, the hope of not being alone, until his son took it away from him…

Viggo orders two men to kill John, and they are choking him with a plastic bag when Marcus kills one of them from far away, saving his life for the second time. Now John frees himself and goes after Viggo to have him reveal where Iosef is, in exchange for sparing his life. Viggo tells him, also adding that they are expecting him, of course. John says that he knows “but it won’t matter” eheh cool :-p

John kills all the guards and finally reaches Iosef and kills him too.

Finally, really. Now, could this be the end? No, it’s not, because Viggo couldn’t let it go and takes it out on Marcus who betrayed him… Viggo beats him up badly, but it's actually Perkins that shoots him first, then Viggo shoots him some more times. Maybe for safety reasons, to be absolutely sure he’s dead, but knowing the type it could also be that he was so angry, it just made him feel better.. Learning that he killed Marcus, John goes after him as well. 

Finally the end of Perkins, when she gets surrounded by Continental men and Winston tells her that she’s no more welcome there because she broke the rules, and they execute her. Good. Rules are rules.

John kills all his men, he kills Avi with the car as a payback, then has the final showdown with Viggo, and of course kills him too.

Now we’re back at the scene at the beginning of the movie, when John is on the floor but is not yet dead. He comes to, gets up, breaks into a vet clinic and takes some stuff to patch himself up as he can, and then he sees a dog. I don’t know why he chose that specific puppy, maybe it was ‘crying’, or maybe looking at him with big melancholy eyes, I don’t know. Anyway, John frees him and takes it home with him :-) Good.