Critics reviews

Both movies savor [Reeves'] aging beauty in the midst of simulated combat. The first Wick is a compact revenge story, while the second one extrapolates outward in a widening circle from John's violent past. Death waits above, below, before, and after every shot in this nihilistic series. It'd be too sad to watch if not for the directors' obvious love of wryly staged action coupled with Reeves' movie star resilience. His body is the only comfort here

With its cut-to-the-bone visual style and derring-do to introduce an alternate universe (in which various high-concept edges are sanded-down into simple procedures), John Wick is probably the closest any action film has come to marrying Bresson and Bioshock.

John Wick is smarter than it looks, but either too ambitious (in doing away with so much) or not ambitious enough. It's a film for those who look at Keanu Reeves and think ‘Zen' as opposed to ‘vacant' – and perhaps those who associate him with The Matrix, as opposed to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Read my opening line again: ‘Keanu Reeves is John Wick, the world's greatest hitman'. If that made you chuckle, you're in the wrong movie.

John Wick is a great piece of film-making. It is made up primarily of fight scenes, ferocious, with a body count equivalent to a small Romanian village. The film was made by two former stuntmen (it is their first feature, and I just have to tip my hat to that – this is incredibly bold, audacious, confident, GORGEOUS film-making) – and besides the story, which is a classic Revenge drama, it is a celebration of the old-school style of stuntmen, what stuntmen (and women) can provide.

A club named after a Jean Pierre-Melville film and two actors from The Wire remind us how many light years we are from a thoughtful treatment of violence. Denuded of anything like politics or humanity, with only a thin soup of sentimentality remaining, John Wick is stripped-down fun only in theory. It's Unforgiven for assholes.

I had a fun time with the kooky Keanu Reeves revenge thriller John Wick (opened October 24th), though less for the zen-constipated mugging of its star (he plays a widowed former hitman who takes on a gaggle of Russian mobsters after they kill his puppy) than with the vivid conspiratorial underworld the film creates—Jacques Rivette by way of Neveldine/Taylor.

The levels of vague detail John Wick provides are counterproductive. You could strip out the coins and the hotel and basically have the same movie... This is supposed to be the anti-Marvel Universe, a throwback to a simpler and better time, and yet the desire to build up a meaningless world can't be suppressed; even with the CGI taken out, the trade of po-faced filler for action righteousness is still in effect.

The film's codirectors, veteran stunt experts, have designed the movie within an eye for impact, and there's an elegant sparseness here that's thrilling. Reeves takes residence in some kind of swanky boutique hotel that caters to criminals—it's the only bit of wit in Derek Kolstad's generic script. John Wick will do for an escape watch with a rabid crowd; don't go in expecting poetry.

This is shameless cinematic manipulation of the first order, but the film knows to parcel it out in doses. In The Equalizer, the manipulation never stopped; once Denzel Washington's character got going, the villains' brutality increased exponentially. John Wick is cleaner: It gives us a visceral reason for the bloodshed, but then it plays it cool. Its ambitions are aesthetic, not moral.

Leitch and Stahelski's staging of the movie's action scenes converts this abstract cool into kinetic energy, combining point-blank gunfire with acrobatic dodges, rolls, and jabs. Like Reeves' own directorial debut, the martial arts flick Man Of Tai Chi, Wick is in part a showcase for practical stunt work, albeit one made with a bit more flash. Silhouettes—a cop seen through a door, a goon through opaque glass—are a motif, transforming characters into backlit shapes.

Brilliant in its simplicity, the setup of"John Wick," like the rest of the movie, passes swiftly and efficiently. Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.

A lot of their shots go noticeably longer than those you'd find in other action flicks of this ilk, and these long takes, along with some elegant tracking shots, pull-backs, and push-ins, have a tendency to mirror Wick's concentration and tactical intellect, seeing the whole of these eruptive environs with a welcome clarity... [But] there's little substance to John Wick, even if it makes brief allusions to the corruptive power of money and violence.