#FreeKeanu: When can we stop pretending that John Wick is good cinema?

In this column, we deliver hot (and cold) takes on pop culture, judging whether a subject is overrated or underrated.

When did we all decide that John Wick, Keanu Reeves’ gruesome action franchise, was good cinema? I can understand how the original film – a campy VCR-era action throwback with a meme-ish premise (Russian mob steals depressed hitman’s car and kills his dog, so he wreaks biblical vengeance) – won over audiences and critics with sheer surprise. But with the fourth instalment out this week, and two other spin-offs (the limited TV series The Continental and the fifth film Ballerina, with Ana de Armas) out later this year, I’m ready for John Wick’s candle to be snuffed out.

The three films to date have become a blockbuster behemoth, earning a combined $US586 million at the global box office off comparatively miniscule budgets. The last instalment, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, released in 2019, claimed $US328 million alone. Directed by Chad Stahelski, the franchise has become the leading light in a wave of action films made by former stuntmen. Fans and critics have praised the films’ kinetic zest and choreographed brutality. To an extent, I can understand the appeal.

Why is so much time spent reloading guns?

The franchise has had its moments of cinematic spectacle. John Wick: Chapter 2‘s hall of mirrors ending, for example, which plays like Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai on steroids. Or Parabellum’s early knife-throwing sequence, which goes on so long it feels like pure comedy. (I also appreciated the bit in Parabellum where Keanu whips a couple of bad guys with his leather belt; removing your belt in the middle of a fight is such an underrated, old-school move.)

But for all its bountiful praise (the films average an astounding 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes), John Wick should really be one of those little-watched, B-grade franchises that get passed around high school hallways on a USB stick, not critically acclaimed multiplex fare. I mean, one guy at Entertainment Weekly even described it as “high art”. “High art” is a big call for a series of films whose screenplays are so threadbare they must total 12 pages combined.

There’s so little dialogue in John Wick that it sounds like sitting down for dinner in a loveless family. If the first film’s exposition was Tommy Wiseau-ish – all soft-focus crossfades like you’re watching those instructional cut scenes in a video game that everyone skips – the character development was non-existent. The recurring set-up for John Wick’s back-story is all bloated reputation, something like: “My son, did you say you upset John Wick? [falls to chair, head in hands] Quick, grab the guns, you have wrought chaos!” The only details we ever get about Wick’s pre-franchise deeds are that his nickname is “Baba Yaga” and that he once “killed three men with a pencil”. Considering that over the course of the movies he kills entire dynasties of Russians with his bare hands (again, over a dog), it’s a fairly unnecessary fable.

Also, why is “Baba Yaga” considered such an imposing nickname in the Wick-verse? Baba Yaga, as every child knows, is a scary old lady who lives in a hut with chicken legs. If I was John Wick, I’d cut a Russian for calling me Baba Yaga. If John Wick was played by, say, Catherine Deneuve rather than Keanu Reeves, then Baba Yaga would be an appropriate nickname, ’cause she’s a (probably scary) older lady. Calling Keanu Reeves Baba Yaga just makes me think the typing monkeys who wrote the script didn’t know any other Slavic mythology and didn’t bother doing any research. I just Googled “What is the male equivalent of Baba Yaga”, and came up with “Koshchei Bessmertnyi, or Koshchei the Immortal. His name, from kost (“bone”), bears the notion of a dying and rising god, a deity who cyclically dies and is reborn.” That’s such a tough name! Can’t you picture some Eastern European kid pulling a quivering gun on Keanu and yelling “Argh, it’s Koshchei Bessmertnyi!” before jumping out the window to escape Wick’s wrath? Instead, we get trembling Russians pointing at Keanu and literally yelling, “Look, it’s the scary old lady who lives in a hut with chicken legs!”

It’s time for John Wick’s candle to finally be snuffed out.

It can be said the franchise distils action films to their barest essentials. This is not a compliment, because in John Wick those essentials are endless shots of Keanu reloading his guns in the middle of a melee and actors grunting like they’re in their neighbourhood dojo every time they grapple. This is supposedly “realism”, an antidote to the soulless, big-scale action of, say, Michael Bay but, to me, it’s just a waste of time. Did you know that the new instalment, John Wick: Chapter 4, has a run time of 2h and 49 mins? I bet they could’ve dropped it by half if they just deleted every shot of Keanu reloading his pistol. It’s not like we’ve been watching action films this whole time thinking, “Wow, Jason Statham has a lot of magical self-reloading weapons…” The reloading’s always been implied!

Perhaps my least favourite thing about the John Wick films is the cringey machismo, the whole “I’m a tough man ’cause I barely talk, I don’t kill women, and I never leave a debt unpaid” ethos. Sure, there’s a long cinematic tradition to this: Westerns, for example, or the films of Jean-Pierre Melville or Walter Hill or John Woo, with their lone-wolf male protagonists bound by their own codes of honour and duty. It’s romantic, especially if you’re, like, a 13-year-old boy with no friends.

And while I guess our world could sorely use more young men who are mostly silent, respectful to women and debt-free, the John Wick movie-verse hinges on a mode of masculinity where holding the door open for a lady and being able to kill a dude by palming him in the solar plexus share equal importance. John Wick feels like the Jordan Peterson of Hollywood blockbusters.

At this point, it should be noted: the fact that John Wick sucks has nothing to do with Keanu Reeves. Keanu is a beacon of unpretentious star power. He lends the films an emotional gravitas they don’t deserve. And really, who could blame him for getting tied up in this thing for a decade now? I’m sure he loves it, saying three lines a picture, wearing a black suit, kicking things, and then making millions in back-end receipts. It only gets depressing when you start imagining all the other things he could be doing with his time, like another Gus Van Sant movie or a rom-com with Winona Ryder set in autumn or a Dogstar reunion. Instead, here comes another 2h and 49 mins of “Baba Yaga” reloading revolvers while using some ethnic dude as temporary armour. To some, that’s the height of cinema. Personally, I think it’s time to #FreeKeanu, even if it’s against his will.

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