And it evolves that Wick has, again, crossed paths with Russian criminals. There is an interesting flashback to Wick’s life as a smiling child, a time before a loss of innocence. “Up to a point,” Wick mutters as he disassembles the sofa. When Wick decides to charge through the window, he has a flashback to the diner. “You like it quiet, right?” asks a waitress in a diner. John Wick’s dialogue is sparse, slow, heavy with anticipation. Writer Greg Pak could have had Mr Reeves sitting next to him at the keyboard, feeding lines for the script of this comic. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this first issue, however, is the dialogue. It is all sudden, visceral, and close quarters. Wick uses his melee martial arts skills to quickly appropriate a gun, kills or wounds most of the thugs, and kicks broken glass in the face of another. Wick recognises the victim (as will fans of the films) and intervenes: he jumps across the gap between the buildings, using a sofa cushion to assist in smashing through the window. The apartment quickly becomes the scene of either a heist or murder involving many armed men. Wick decides to observe the apartment from an adjacent building. He overhears a conversation which drops a name from Wick’s past, along with an address. The story begins when Wick enters a diner in El Paso, Texas. (The extent of action choreography in the motion pictures, in which the fighting is filmed as extended scenes without camera breaks and cuts, must have been extraordinary.) All of those elements are, again, plain in this first issue of the comic. In the motion pictures, Wick is depicted as uncannily fast, with impeccable aim, and the ability to ruthlessly improvise. But it also springs from amazement at the level of skill which John Wick applies to his craft. The fanaticism for the movie is partly grounded in this polite and moral code of killers. It is designed to be immediately recognisable to fans of what has very quickly become a cult classic movie. This comic book is immersed in that underpinning mythos from the motion pictures. Had John Wick not had that nuance, we assume Mr Reeves would not have accepted the role. The world of John Wick is one of surreally ritualised violence. Rules around places of neutrality and respect abound. Second, Wick is a player in a shadowy underworld where there is highly formalised etiquette. He is a morally ambiguous character in that, first, Wick gave up murder for love and only returned to a life of death and destruction through the compulsion to avenge the memory of his dead wife. John Wick is a brutal murderer, an assassin brought out of quiet retirement through the inadvertent stupidity of the spoilt son of a Russian crime boss. We guess from that, and from John Wick, that there are lines that Mr Reeves will not cross in accepting certain types of roles. When Mr Reeves was not, playing, for example, a serial killer in the movie, The Watcher, the character was imbued with a macabre sense of honour such that none of his female victims were raped before their murder. Mr Reeves almost always plays the hero in his motion pictures. Mr Reeves has made his fame primarily through involvement in action movies and in science fiction movies. They can put that on the character’s tombstone and also – many, many decades hence – on Keanu Reeves’s.The two motion pictures (released in 20) featuring and named after the title character, John Wick, are primarily vehicles for the talents and role inclinations of American actor Keanu Reeves. “I’ve been a huge fan forever, and so far you haven’t disappointed,” an admiring villain says of Wick. The film exists to devise endlessly inventive and balletic ways of beating the odds when one man is assaulted by a football team’s worth of assassins. A thousand people get shot, but nobody is ever actually hurt. Notwithstanding Detective Pikachu, we have yet to see a genuinely brilliant video game adaptation, but the Wick films do amazing work with that world’s extravagant aesthetic. Our creatively violent hero gets to ride a horse through New York City The films are certainly silly and a bit vulgar – every scene looks like a themed Las Vegas version of itself – but they are masterpieces of martial choreography.ĭirector Chad Stahelski is back at the top of his game Critics have an unfortunate habit of declaring such films “high-end trash” or something similar.
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