2/5
John Wick is a pretty silly movie. The conceit of the film is that a well-known assassin named John Wick (Reeves) retires from the killing business for a woman (Moynahan) who ends up dying of an unknown chronic disease. When a seemingly random crime takes away the final gift from his late wife, Wick returns to his violent past on a quest for vengeance.
The movie has a few unique aspects, but is otherwise drab and uninspired. What's cool? The video game-like action and the snippets of comedy. It didn't feel like other shoot-em-up action flicks; it felt like a shoot-em-up action game. And it never takes itself too seriously, throwing in hilarious jokes at its own expense. Sometimes it feels overly silly, but it works more often than I would have expected. What's poor? Everything else. The movie starts in media res for no other reason than that it's commonplace now. It adds nothing to the excitement or the plot; if anything it flattens and compresses the story's progression. The script is full of cliched one-liners delivered with surprising blandness coming from the somewhat well-respected actors. There is no build-up to an explosive finale. It just continues from one random action scene to the next, with perhaps the coolest one being the first one. All in all, I cannot recommend this film to even the most diehard of Keanu Reeves fans.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2911666/