I’m kind of late to the John Wick party. I’d heard the title tossed around on social media, but since I’m typically not into shoot-‘em-up action movies, I didn’t pay it much attention. Even my dad, who is into those kinds of movies, had ignored the trilogy the numerous times he saw them on the library shelves.
Well, FOMO finally kicked in. I got tired of wondering what the movies were about. It probably didn’t hurt when I found out that Keanu Reeves was in them either. I got the first movie from the library…then I ordered the other two about 20 minutes into it. I was totally hooked! So, I’m going to talk about that first movie a bit.
Here’s the synopsis:
When sadistic young thugs senselessly attack John Wick — a brilliantly lethal ex-assassin — they have no idea that they’ve just awakened the boogeyman. With New York City as his bullet-riddled playground, Wick embarks on a merciless rampage, hunting down his adversaries with the skill and ruthlessness that made him an underworld legend.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
John Wick
We first meet John Wick (Keanu Reeves) as he crashes his SUV into a curb, stumbles out the vehicle, and collapses onto the pavement. He has several serious wounds. Frankly, he looks nearly dead.
In the following scenes, we learn more about John’s recent life. He’s mourning the death of his wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan), from an unspecified “illness.” We see John’s final moments with Helen after she’s removed from life support; Helen’s funeral and repast; and the arrival of Daisy, an adorable beagle that Helen arranged to be delivered to John after her death to keep him company.
The juxtaposition of John’s different lives masterfully sets up the rest of the movie. The opening scene creates an image of who John was and who he will be again by the end of the movie. The subsequent scenes show us who John currently is. They raise questions in the viewer about how John goes from one mindset to the other.
The real story begins when John meets a young Russian guy at a gas station. John doesn’t know it at the time, but the guy is Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the son of John’s former employer Viggo. Iosef gets mad when John declines to sell him his car. That night, Iosef and his buddies break into John’s house to teach him a lesson. They beat him until he loses consciousness, kill Daisy, steal his car, and destroy his van (which probably belonged to Helen).
I gave John a lot of flack for not doing anything at first. I mean, Iosef and crew follow John home undetected. They disable his alarm system (assuming John even has one) and John doesn’t know they’re there until Daisy alerts him. When he goes downstairs to investigate, he doesn’t take a gun with him because a) his weapons are all buried beneath a slab of concrete in his basement, and b) he has no reason to think there’s anything going on that requires a gun. John doesn’t fight back because he gets a baseball bat to the head the second he comes down the stairs. How did all of this happen to such an iconic assassin?
I also find it odd that John and Iosef don’t know (or know of) each other. When John left the life about five years ago, Iosef would have been in his late teens/early twenties, so you’d think they would have crossed paths at some point. There’s no way John would forget someone as obnoxious as Iosef. And given John’s status as “Baba Yaga” and Viggo’s assertion that John “laid the foundation of what we are now,” Iosef should know him. Did Viggo purposely keep Iosef and John apart to prevent a version of this exact scenario from playing out?
After having watched the movie a few more times, however, I’m giving John the benefit of the doubt. John has become complacent. It’s like he completely deactivated his assassin mode when he quit the life. Based on things I picked up from the other two movies, there must be an unspoken rule that a retired assassin is off-limits to the others. Therefore, he wouldn’t be worried about any enemies coming after him. It’s still sloppy of John to have completely dropped his guard, but it’s understandable.
Anyway, John has to make a choice: ignore Iosef or kill Iosef. John goes with Option 2. Dude is pissed. And why shouldn’t he be? I was mad! Throw in the fact that John’s memories of his wife are closely tied to both the car and the dog…nope. Too many lines were crossed. It’s on.
John suits up — literally, in a nice black suit that is apparently his assassin uniform — knowing that Viggo’s next move will be to send a team to take him out before he can get to Iosef. Oh, and John’s neither rusty nor unarmed now. Somewhere between digging up his gear and donning that suit, John becomes a completely different person. He drops bodies all over his house, deflects the half-hearted noise inquiries from Jimmy the Cop (who is clearly on someone’s payroll), and hires a cleanup crew to get rid of the evidence.
Returning to his original goal, John travels to the Continental Hotel. The Continental is a normal hotel that also secretly operates as neutral ground for assassins. Winston (Ian McShane), the hotel’s owner and John’s friend, gives John some solid advice: “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond you may well find something reaches out and drags you back into its depths.” John duly notes the warning, but he’s only interested in information about Iosef’s current whereabouts.
I noticed that John only gets info from other people (either voluntarily or forcibly). I don’t recall seeing John use his smartphone for anything other than watching videos of Helen. We never see him use a computer or even consult a computer geek. This is probably a habit born out of the desire to stay off the grid. Maybe that’s why all of the assassins seem to rely on flip phones and other forms of old school technology. It’s harder to track, if only because no one would expect people to still be using the stuff.
John chases Iosef through half the city before he eventually catches the other man in a “secure” warehouse. Like before, John takes out all of Viggo’s men in the large facility. Iosef tries to run away, but John catches him and shoots him twice. Like a true idiot, Iosef dies while saying, “It was just a f***ing dog.” Unbelievable!
Iosef’s death is anti-climatic and absolutely better than he deserves. I think John decides on a quick kill for several reasons. First, he wants to put a fork in the situation. Second, John’s not completely unsympathetic to the fact that he’s killing someone’s only child, especially having just lost a loved one himself. And third, things have escalated so far that Iosef is almost an afterthought now. John’s real battle is with Viggo.
Thus, we return to that opening scene. John is beat to hell after battling Viggo’s personal guards in an awesome crash derby/shoot out and killing Viggo himself in a hand-to-hand fight. He’s ready to throw in the towel. A video of his wife on his phone convinces him to pull himself together. He drags himself to an animal clinic to dress his wounds. As he gives himself first aid, he checks out the barking dogs in their cages. His eyes land on a gray pitbull, who is silently observing him. John decides to “adopt” him and they walk off into the night together.
It’s no coincidence that John picks a dog that’s so different from Daisy. He is not the guy he was with Daisy (or his wife) anymore. That John is as dead as they are. He doesn’t want a dog that reminds him of what he’s lost. He needs a dog that’s strong enough to survive in the assassin world, one that can take care of itself in a way that Daisy couldn’t.
Viggo Tarasov
Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) is a mob boss and the movie’s villain. He finds out what his son Iosef did to John through Aurelio (John Leguizamo), the owner of the chop shop where Iosef takes John’s stolen car for new papers. The “Oh, shit!” look on his face when he hears the news? Yeah, Viggo knows exactly what’s about to go down. He calls John to try to work out some kind of deal, but John’s not trying to hear any of that.
Viggo has no good options here. On one hand, it’s his responsibility to protect his family. Family is usually extremely important to these mob types. Iosef is Viggo’s only child. He has to kill John to save Iosef. But he can’t because it’s John Wick. How does it look to the gang if their leader isn’t strong enough to protect his own son from one guy? Not good at all.
At the same time, Viggo has probably already been losing face because of Iosef. Iosef is a spoiled brat and a loose cannon. He’s the epitome of those dudes who throw fits while yelling, “Do you know who my father is?!” I bet Viggo covers for him a lot too, as evidenced by the fact that Iosef automatically assumes that Viggo is mad at him for messing up the job he was coming home from when he ran into John. Viggo even tells John at one point, “While you had your wife, I had my son. And believe me, you had a far better deal.” How can he maintain control of his empire if he can’t even control his son?
This will sound cold, but the smartest move would have been for Viggo to give Iosef to John from jump. That would have solved so many of his problems. Instead, Viggo makes increasingly stupid decisions that force John to do increasingly destructive things. By the time Viggo finally decides to give up Iosef’s location, he’s basically ruined. He’s got nothing left to lose. This likely explains why he decides to throw away his last chance to call it even by killing John’s friend Marcus.
Ultimately, Viggo dies after John stabs him in the neck during their final fight. His last words are, “Be seeing you.” All of the assassins say this to each other. It reminds me of the similar phrase, “See you in Hell.” Viggo tells John earlier in the movie that people like them are “cursed” and that “This life follows you.” We already know that John blames himself for his wife’s death, like all of his past misdeeds caught up with him and rubbed off on Helen. So I guess the phrase is a way to acknowledge that they’re all going to pay for the horrible things they’ve done in the afterlife. It’s Viggo’s time to burn now, but John will join him sooner or later.
Marcus
Marcus (Willem Dafoe) is an assassin associate of John’s. He turns up at Helen’s funeral and offers his condolences to John while they stand in the rain. The next time we see Marcus, he’s accepting a $2 million contract from Viggo to kill John. WTH, man?
To his credit, Marcus seems to be on John’s side. I think Marcus feels bad for John and his situation, so he takes the contract to buy John some extra time to kill Iosef without interference. Marcus probably figures that even though the contract is open, Viggo trusts his skills enough that he won’t hire anyone else to kill John right away.
There is a moment, however, when Marcus appears to consider fulfilling the contract. John is chilling in his hotel room, injured from a nightclub fight with Viggo’s henchmen, and Marcus is on the roof with his sniper scope focused on John. Is Marcus checking up on John, or is he preparing to shoot him? Friendship is one thing, but $2 million is $2 million. What assassin wouldn’t be tempted? If Marcus is thinking about flipping the script, he quickly changes his mind and starts actively protecting John. He fires a shot into John’s pillow to warn him that Perkins, another assassin whom Viggo hires, has broken into John’s room to kill him.
Thwarting Perkins is a fatal mistake for Marcus. She starts following him around and immediately tattles to Viggo when she catches him meeting with John. Viggo meets Marcus at his home and begins to torture him for his duplicity. Taking matters into his own hands, Marcus charges and kills Viggo’s guards. Perkins shoots him and Viggo finishes him off with six more shots. John races to save Marcus when Viggo calls him to gloat, but it’s too late.
While a small part of Marcus may have hoped that everything would turn out okay, I think he knew the odds were higher that he would get caught. His resigned attitude when he finds Viggo in his house says as much. As the last of the “old guard,” as Viggo calls him, Marcus knew what would happen to him when Viggo inevitably learned the truth. Maybe Marcus felt that his time was up and he wanted to go out with a bang, like a real assassin, rather than live out a boring life playing with his juicer.
Perkins
Perkins (Adrianne Palicki) is the only female assassin we meet by name in the movie. John runs into her when he first checks into the Continental. They greet each other coolly in the lobby as he’s entering and she’s leaving. Although Perkins gives assassins in general (and female assassins in particular) a bad name, she serves several important purposes in the movie.
First, Perkins fulfills the stereotypical unscrupulous assassin role, which is necessary to show the difference between John and the average assassin. Perkins will kill anybody for the right price. She has zero problems going after John in his hotel room even though he’s injured and it’s verboten to kill in the Continental when Viggo offers her double the money to do so. Sometimes she kills because she enjoys it, like when she helps kill Marcus for messing up her money. It doesn’t matter to her.
Second, Perkins shows us how John handles female opponents. John always seems so gentlemanly. I worried that he might go easy on her. He doesn’t, at least not in the fight itself. Perkins goes all-in and John does the same. He can’t afford to pull his punches. Still, he doesn’t kill her outright. John doesn’t take her attempted murder personally. He incapacitates her and pays another assassin acquaintance, Harry, to babysit her until she can be taken off his hands.
Finally, Perkins shows us what happens to assassins who break the Continental’s oft-repeated top rule: no conducting assassin business on the grounds. Perkins blatantly breaks the rules by attempting to kill John and actually killing Harry, whom she shoots during her escape. And don’t make me unpack the mechanics of the only female assassin murdering the only Black assassin.
For her crimes, Perkins receives a summons from Winston via Charon (Lance Reddick), the Continental’s concierge, to a scenic location where she is executed by Winston’s firing squad. Until this moment, the top rule doesn’t feel that serious. Now we see that the rules are very official with very real consequences. This is important for future movies.
Conclusion
John Wick (Chapter 1) is my favorite of the three movies. This is where it all begins. John is a fascinating character and Viggo is a great villain. I like the little bits of humor buried amongst the violence and sadness too. It drives me absolutely crazy how much I don’t know about John, but speculating about the mysteries only makes things more fun for me.
I purposely didn’t talk about a few characters, like Winston and Charon. It’s not that they’re not important. It’s just that they play bigger parts in the other movies and I want to save my commentary on them for later.
*John Wick DVD cover © Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment*