Movie Monday – John Wick (2014)

My introductory post.  

John Wick on IMDB  

(Spoilers)

John Wick starts with his wife dying after battling some disease.  Shortly after the funeral, he receives a puppy that she arranged for him to get so that he wouldn’t be alone.  A couple days later, he’s out in his classic car when this Russian thug takes note of it.  The thug asks how much, and John says that it’s not for sale.  That night, the thug and a couple of his guys break into John’s house, beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog.

The thug takes the car to a chop shop and the owner asks where he got the car and punches the guy.  The thug says the owner will pay because his dad is the Russian mob boss.  When the boss calls the owner asking why he punched his son, the owner replies that they stole the car from John Wick.  The boss replies, “Oh,” and hangs up.  When his son gets home, he beats him up and tells him that John Wick is the guy you send to kill the Boogeyman.  When he met his wife, he asked to leave the business, so the mob boss gave him an impossible task which John apparently handled with ease.

While this is going on, John digs up the guns and money he had buried in his basement.  The boss sends a dozen guys to kill him, and John easily kills all of them.  He then goes to New York to stay in this hitman hotel, and he starts killing a bunch of the Russian mob to get to the son.  Eventually, things get so bad the boss makes a deal with John Wick and tells him where his son is hiding.  So John kills the son, and then starts back home.

The boss had put a hit out on John, but one of his friends – instead of killing him – had been helping him.  So the boss kills him because if he had just shot John his son would still be alive.  Then, like an idiot, the boss calls John and tells him that.  So John goes and kills the boss.

The movie ends with a bloodied John breaking into a kennel to fix himself up.  He then steals a dog that was supposed to be euthanized.

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There are a lot of mindless action movies out there, and at first this sounds like another one of those.  But this movie takes it to another level.  When I rewatched this movie (something I only do for really interesting movies) I started counting how many people he kills, but when he got to about twenty, I said, “Screw it, this is too entertaining to ruin by counting.” And when I say kill, I don’t mean the boring old one shot, burst of blood, bad guy falls down kind you see in most mindless action movies.  Most of his kills are two or three shots to the chest and one to the head.  There’s a scene where John shoots a guy a couple of times in the chest, and the guy is leaning against a wall groaning.  John takes a few seconds to reload, and then shoots the guy in the head before going on to the next bad guy.  It’s this ruthless, methodical nature that clearly shows why the smart people in the movie don’t mess with John Wick.