John Wick

I have a suggestion for supernumerary henchmen assigned supporting roles in Ninja-style attacks on professional assassins:  When the first six or so of your cohort have been slaughtered by the target of your attack, surviving assailants should give up the effort, put away their weapons and Ninja accoutrements and silently slink away.  I presume that henchman-work is not well-paid, probably less than 20 dollars an hour, and with lousy, or no benefits -- accordingly, when your victim kills a half-dozen or so of your compatriots, it is the better part of valor to withdraw from the job.  I always salute the heroism, albeit misplaced, of those nameless gang members who manfully continue the assault after its target has already rubbed-out the first half-dozen members of the team -- you want to shout out:  "Dude! It's not worth it!  Just go home!"  But, of course, in films like John Wick (2014), professional responsibility trumps discretion:  the killers just keep coming, one after another, pure cannon fodder for the homicidal hero who blithely wipes out the whole crew and, then, calls a corpse disposal service, identifies "dinner reservations for 12" (the number of his victims) and sits down the read the newspaper -- he can't smoke a cigarette because this would send a bad message to the young -- while awaiting the clean-up workers.  John Wick is so ludicrously violent that it amusing until the number of murders reaches several hundred; at that point, even the most hardened action fan will find himself (or herself) jaded by the ongoing carnage.  There's no film here -- just a series of fight scenes in which Keanu Reeves dispatches armies of attacking bad guys.  The action is effectively choreographed but there is nothing remotely realistic about the interminable bloodbath comprising the last three-quarters of the film and, of course, the movie develops zero suspense -- it is obvious that John Wicks, the hyper-efficient assassin central to this film, is immortal and utterly impervious to injury:  his bullets always hit their target with unerring accuracy while the hail of gunfire in which he pirouettes and whirls is uniformly unavailing, a thousand bullets don't succeed so much as scratching his face or mussing his hair.  A couple times, he falls thirty or forty feet -- no problem, an ice-pack on the shoulder will ameliorate any symptoms from that mishap.  Wounded in the side, Wicks either gets a colleague to do a little impromptu surgery employing expensive booze as an anesthetic or does the fix-up work himself using a veterinary staple-gun.  Wicks is so tough that in the climactic duel to the death, he distracts his hapless enemy by using a dagger to stab his own belly thereby so perplexing the villain that the blade, withdrawn from the hero's guts, can be used to pierce the bad guy's throat.  All of this grisly action is shot in near dark; the editing is crisp and the action scenes staged effectively within the shot.  The montage, however, doesn't establish any larger context for the violence and so the movie is a series of four to five second shots showing Reeves butchering between two and three bad guys per set-up -- he uses his revolver as a club and firearm simultaneously, beating down the attacking henchmen while also shooting them at close-range.  There are a few witty ideas in the film:  the assassins are members of an exclusive guild and all stay at the same deluxe hotel in downtown Manhattan -- they are forbidden to kill one another on the premises.  The killers pay for their expensive rooms and cocktails with gold coins and have their own homicide-lounge, a bar qua disco where they can relax with some orgiastic dancing to metal-rave music.  Willem Defoe has a supporting role and seems much too old for the balletic violence in which he is involved:  he also gets torturued a bit, although nothing compared to the hard use that he suffered as Our Lord in The Passion of the Christ. Reeves looks mean and glowers a lot but most of the time he is just spinning and twirling, a blur of motion, as he kills dozens of assailants at a time.  Periodically, the director will punctuate the carnage with cliché images of Manhattan's skyline filmed from a sinister overhead angle -- completely pointless interpolations in the ongoing blood bath.  You can't watch a picture like this without forming the treasonous desire to see John Wicks killed -- I find myself always rooting that the eighth or tenth or thirtieth anonymous henchman will put a bullet right through the hero's preening skull.  But, alas, no such luck.  The Wikipedia entry on this minor film, a picture that I don't recall even opening where I live, is longer than the write-up on Citizen Kane or Vertigo and, I must say, far more enthusiastic as to the merits of the film.  I am probably failing to appreciate this film's merits -- it certainly has a number of highly vociferous fans.