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John Wick

I haven’t seen these John Wick movies, because I assumed that they were, well, pretty tedious, but I’ve recently seen several people with good taste state that they rather like these films, so I went ahead and bought the box set.

This better be good!

This is from 2014 — the apex (or possibly the zenith) of the Colour Grading Wars. Not a single pixel will make it to the screen with the actual colour it had when filming!

Aww.

OK, now the revenge is gonna start?

This is actually pretty well made. I mean, they are fridging the dog to give him a reason to start killing people (which is a better twist on this than usual — fridging a daughter or wife would be more traditional), but they’re also giving us a reason to care first. Which is unusual. That is, they managed to make the Keanu character both sympathetic and interesting in a very efficient (and non-clichéd) way.

But now I’m wondering whether he’s gonna get a new dog for each movie?

It’s too bad the fighting is happening in darkness, really… Not a very confident approach.

It’s Bergerac!

Finally! Ultraviolence!

The whole point of this movie is presumably to allow people to enjoy watching Keanu kill a whole bunch of Russians, so it’s a bit odd that it’s taken this long… but on the other hand, there’s 50 minutes to go, so perhaps the rest of the movie is just going to be Russapocalypse?

Very practical to have the sight light up your face.

I guess this is more of a fantasy movie than an action movie… The fantasy being that there’s a whole underworld of elegant hotels and clubs for elegant assassins etc.

I’m not quite sure how to throw the die on this one. Were the action sequences good? Yes. Was I bored? Yes. Was it interesting? Kinda.

John Wick. Chad Stahelski, David Leitch. 2014.

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