John Wick (2014)/John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
I'm very late to watching these, and still have the third one to watch, but was anyone else weirdly underwhelmed? There was tons of hype about it being a great action movie series, and don't get me wrong, there's some wonderful action sequences, fight coordination is on point, and the "look" of the films is a cool vaguely neo-noir, but I guess my logic kept kicking in too much.
[Spoiler (click to open)]The first film starts with Wick's wife already dead, but at least the villain didn't do it... but he did fridge the puppy and stole the man's car. Wick goes on a one-man mission to kill the man who did it (and his two accomplices, I guess), and he happens to be the son of a Russian mobster that Wick helped get into power back in his days as an assassin. And that's where I get hung up. He's supposed to have been this great assassin, yet he's killing people all over the place without any law enforcement ever rolling up on him.
The people he's shooting are probably bad guys too, but in some scenes he's in clubs and shooting at people and my mind just plays it as some of the people trying to stop him may think he's a mass shooter. I mean... they're not wrong, but now they're dead and may not really even have been part of it. Maybe the first film hits a bit different because it's before the Pulse nightclub shooting. The second film was probably in production about that time.
There's also a rather elaborate setup of just about everyone you pass on the street in NYC and other major cities is probably an assassin, there's a secret underground of body disposal, hotels that act like holy ground (no "business" on premises), and even tailors who make bullet resistant suits. Not to mention literal coins and markers that fuel certain transactions, as well as a rather Steampunk style switchboard system to dispatch hit orders. I was rather intrigued by this stuff, but it's not really a major portion of the plot.
I'm thinking maybe the hype and my Keanu love left me expecting more. It's not bad, and I will watch the third one (and there's more in the works), but I think it could be much "smarter" in certain ways. It's pure revenge fantasy instead of "the assassin outsmarts the bad guy(s)".
[Spoiler (click to open)]The first film starts with Wick's wife already dead, but at least the villain didn't do it... but he did fridge the puppy and stole the man's car. Wick goes on a one-man mission to kill the man who did it (and his two accomplices, I guess), and he happens to be the son of a Russian mobster that Wick helped get into power back in his days as an assassin. And that's where I get hung up. He's supposed to have been this great assassin, yet he's killing people all over the place without any law enforcement ever rolling up on him.
The people he's shooting are probably bad guys too, but in some scenes he's in clubs and shooting at people and my mind just plays it as some of the people trying to stop him may think he's a mass shooter. I mean... they're not wrong, but now they're dead and may not really even have been part of it. Maybe the first film hits a bit different because it's before the Pulse nightclub shooting. The second film was probably in production about that time.
There's also a rather elaborate setup of just about everyone you pass on the street in NYC and other major cities is probably an assassin, there's a secret underground of body disposal, hotels that act like holy ground (no "business" on premises), and even tailors who make bullet resistant suits. Not to mention literal coins and markers that fuel certain transactions, as well as a rather Steampunk style switchboard system to dispatch hit orders. I was rather intrigued by this stuff, but it's not really a major portion of the plot.
I'm thinking maybe the hype and my Keanu love left me expecting more. It's not bad, and I will watch the third one (and there's more in the works), but I think it could be much "smarter" in certain ways. It's pure revenge fantasy instead of "the assassin outsmarts the bad guy(s)".