John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum

It surprises me that I have not seen a Keanu Reeves movie in a theater since 2006's A Scanner Darkly. It has been a long time and this will be the first time that I will have written down an opinion of the man: a fascinating subject in its own right. Keanu Reeves is an enigma in itself. It is hard to think of a worst actor who has been the star in so many great movies. I generally avoid blaming a movie for bad acting. What seems like bad acting a lot of the time is bad writing, bad directing, bad editing, or all of the above. But I have seen some bad acting from Keanu Reeves. He has a basic character that does well enough in action blockbusters but can be woefully miscast when venturing outside basic Keanu. What were they thinking when they cast him as Siddhartha Buddha?

Still even his dramatic failures reveal decent taste. Why is he doing Shakespeare? He can't perform it, but we can give him credit for choosing the roles. A movie star does not have to appear in one of the smaller roles in Much Ado About Nothing. And though The Matrix triology did not depend on its inner philosophical tones to work, it is clear that Keanu understood it well enough. Further, what he lacks in great acting ability he can make up for being incredibly dependable guy. His reputation is divorced from any particular character. It is the man himself. That man, though nominally John Wick, shows up in this movie doing all of his own actions scenes and stunts. Like a decent Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan movie, the plot machinations of John Wick are hardly important. They merely set up action sequences whose existence are in and of themselves impressive. This is a movie whose "making-of" documentary would be just as exciting and for the same reasons. I watched this movie with a person who was impressed with the movie's work ethic of all things.

Unlike a mediocre blockbuster that is content to limit itself to endless battles with machine guns, there isn't an action sequence in John Wick that isn't unique. He fights a giant with a book, he fights two small twins with knives, he fights a few guys in a horse stable (uses the horses too), fights with shotguns, pistols, and throwing knives. You never see the same fight twice and all the fights are lightly edited and in a wide enough camera so that you can tell always what is happening and know that nobody is cheating...too much. The best fight however has to do with superbly trained dog actors. For reasons we don't have to explain, Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry fight a bunch of bad dudes with guns and with Berry's two trained dogs. The dogs do incredible stunts with hopefully well-padded victims/dog-trainers. One dog must have jumped at least ten feet in one scene.

I never saw John Wick or John Wick 2. I was told that all I needed to know was that the bad dudes killed John Wick's dog in the first movie and stole his car in the second. Turns out, that appears all I needed to know. At the beginning of John Wick 3, which apparently starts minutes after John Wick 2 ends and a few weeks from John Wick, there is a huge price put on John Wick's head. All the assassin's in the world are out to kill him. What a great excuse for a lot of fight scenes. Fittingly, the director, Chad Stahelski, had been Keanu's stunt double for many movies, including the Matrix trilogy.

In between fights, Keanu has several serious conversations with older heavyweight actors like Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Angelica Huston. Interestingly everyone is somehow connected to Eastern European or Islamic civilizations. This lends to the many dour lectures on humanity and authority. John Wick is the first character I have seen who hails from Belarus. Who knew such characters existed? It is also quite fun to consider the character of Ian McShane who steadfastly refuses to provide anything but terse language and the imbibing of very good looking alochol in an otherwise action-packed movie. Mark Dascascos plays the main nemesis, Zero. Like the more entertaining villains, he prefers to kill with a sword.

Don't call it a trilogy. John Wick is being divided into chapters and this book is likely to contain many. After all, John Wick's dog remains shot and more bad guys are left to kill.