John Wick (2014), directed by Chad Stahelski. Streaming at home, Wednesday, March 29.

A lot of people love the John Wick movies–this newest one busted a bunch of box office beans and made the critics go wowsa. I really enjoy good action movies and man, it seemed like John Wick would be a good, fun place to go. But I have a lot of questions and stuff after watching this well made but, honestly, kinda boring film.

1. I think Keanu Reeves is this generation’s John Wayne. He’s not a good actor, he’s a product, you get what you expect. No, he doesn’t have Wayne’s repellant politics (we think, anyway), but he’s got Wayne’s range, that’s for sure. That’s not a bad thing–I think John Wayne is an underrated actor, especially as a comic actor (see Rio Bravo, True Grit, El Dorado, North to Alaska.) I wouldn’t be surprised if 20 or so years after Keanu’s gone, that era’s younger generation is going to think, “What the fuck? People liked this guy?”
   
2. In both novels and feature films, it sure seems like it’s a ready character trait to have the main dude grieving over a woman. Often, if not always, a perfect woman, the perfect wife, beautiful and all smiles. With her death, the man’s true, genuine happiness is gone! Paul Auster, considered a very good writer, has peddled that character in I don’t know how many books. And here, I just gotta sigh and think, why can’t Wick just be pissed that they stole his car and killed his dog? His having a wife who’s died doesn’t add anything to the plot other than it forces Keanu out of his acting zone to ill effect. Keanu should never cry in his movies. He’s just not good at it.
   
3. You can get puppies delivered?
   
4. You can get puppies delivered, but whomever delivers them doesn’t think to include food?
   
5. A prediction: in the next 15 years, Keanu is going to get a supporting role in some decent Oscar-bait art house movie and win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He’ll deserve it. Everyone who wins an Oscar deserves it. And I mean that.
   
6. One would think that John Wick’s home would not be so easily accessed by… everyone? I mean, I know John Wick World is like some alternative Dantean purgatory, but still, wouldn’t hit men want anonymity?
   
7. Back to the puppy: I think when the bad guys kill the dog the filmmakers missed a great comedic opportunity. When the pup was killed in Wick it dawned on me that there is going to be a distinct lack of humor in this movie. I mean, couldn’t John Wick have just been a dude whose car is stolen and he’s super attached to this dog and has to conduct his revenge on peeps while dealing with said pup? Imagine him firing upon the hordes while trying to shield little Fido? Or stopping to pull a used plastic bag out of his jacket to scoop up a small turd whilst one of these mean Russians tries to knife him?
   
8. What? Did no one understand that the Allstate Mayhem guy is not even a good actor in those commercials?
   
9. I chuckle every time I hear the name “John Wick” because it sounds like an antiquated British euphemism for a cock or a sexual act. Then again, I was desperate for laughter in this movie.
   
10. “I once saw him kill three men in a bar… with a pencil!” Or you’re misremembering Heath Ledger doing the same (to just one man, though) in The Dark Knight.
    
11. I guess they’re making a spin-off of the John Wick films with Ana de Armas? All I know is that the spin-off should be about this clean-up crew that comes in and takes a single gold coin to remove all evidences of misdeeds. That crew is led by David Patrick Kelly, from The Warriors! Anyway, after a vast killing, this crew drives up in a van and a bunch of surly men lumber out–guys who don’t look like killers but serial criminal failures–and then proceed to do a spot-on job of cleaning up body fluids, sweeping up broken glass, and then shrink wrapping corpses for disposal, who knows where. What a fun and interesting movie that would be.
    
12. Damn, John Wick is so conservative, both in its politics and its worldview. I mean, it’s all dudes in power and subservient women. There’s a female assassin who should have been butchered like everyone else who attacks Mr. Wick, but, because she’s a woman, is left to kill even more. Which she does, is captured, escapes in a way that’s utterly predictable, and then is later dispatched in a way that’s weirdly uninteresting. So many times in this movie I kept thinking how much more interesting it would be if John Wick were gay or bisexual. But they want those Trump dollars, and they got ’em, that’s for sure.
    
13. I had just watched Key & Peele’s Dubstep sketch before Wick (a mistake), so when the dance/action set-piece in the movie hit, with the same type of music, all I could think about was Keegan-Michael Key’s bloody nose and missing tooth. Like I said, I was desperately looking for humor.
    
14. I wish the character of John Wick weren’t such a dumb sledgehammer. None of his revenge involves an ounce of wit or intelligence, nothing like pitting one bad guy against another, thinking two or three steps ahead of people who think they’re thinking two or three steps ahead. No, our Mr. Wick just goes into a place, seemingly with little plan, and is able to just blast people away. Literally dozens of people (it helps that they’re typically bad shots). Like No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chighur, he can do this without attracting the attention of police. So many bodies! I think there might literally be over 100 people dead in this film, nameless thugs who just rush into places to get blasted. They have virtually no plan, either.
    
15. Lance Reddick has an amazing voice. So why give him a mediocre Caribbean accent or whatever that was?
    
16. So you see Wick killing all these people, unstoppable, and yet none of the assassins, watching him dispatch people with ease, thinks to run away or maybe even kill their own boss and end this thing already. They’re all, to a man, as dumb as he is. Plus, the filmmakers created a world full of damn rules. To stop being a hitman you have to do this-and-such. If you go here, no one can harm you. If you do this, this will happen. So many rules and codes are mentioned, but they’re broken in a heartbeat, and for awhile this transgression is ignored, until it’s not and then punishment arrives so swiftly it’s of little interest, and virtually no tension.
    
17. Ultimately, John Wick, though not based on a video game, is certainly influenced by them–the high body count and the camera just following the end of his every weapon is sign enough. It often felt as though I should be reaching for a joystick to move John Wick through each room and hallway, and Keanu’s stiff acting wasn’t much more graceful than a Grand Theft Auto avatar. What’s sad is that this movie reaches a plateau and just works from there–the end of this movie isn’t any more compelling or thrilling than the first 20 minutes. I mean, aside from the many sequels, you know Wick isn’t going to die, all you’re doing is hoping to see him do some martial arts (which he did better in The Matrix, a film that looks better with every silly thing Keanu does in its wake) and kill people. Which he does with very little difficulty. This netherworld of assassins is in itself banal–the Continental Hotel, a neutral ground where the killers can go with impunity, isn’t very interesting, and all the people look the same, young hardbodies all, or the men are old and handsomely grizzled. Each room in the Continental doesn’t even look luxurious or interesting, it looks like a nice, moderately priced room you’d find outside of Disneyland or at a Shriner’s convention in Manhattan. God, how I wished for just an ounce of Blade Runner’s art direction or James Bond’s or the Matrix’s cool!