Tag: John Wick

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) – A Movie Review

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When I watched and reviewed the earlier chapters in the John Wick “saga” I noted that the number of bullets and kills had increased orders of magnitude between the first and second installments and if that trend were to be continued into a third movie it would be necessary for Mr. Wick to slaughter whole sectors of the galaxy to provide the sheer numbers necessary.

Well, I was wrong.  In this third movie, John Wick is still only killing gangsters within the confines of the borough of Manhattan.  Well, except for a short sojourn to Casablanca to get some help from Halle Berry in finding a mystical Arab mafioso who requires John to cut off a finger Yakuza style and rededicate himself to “The Table.”  While there, he barely kills anyone at all, less than a hundred.

Okay, forget about plot.  It’s entirely too stupid to even mention.  Suffice it to say that John Wick is fighting and killing assassins so quickly and continuously that he must have single-handedly used up all the ammunition on the planet.  He even depleted all of the armor piercing rounds on Earth.

On a personal note, Keanu Reeves is looking very old.  It’s clear that all this fighting is taking a terrible toll on him.  And it’s no surprise.  Without a serious count I’ll say conservatively Mr. Wick was hurled through several dozen panes of glass, thrown off a four-story building, shot a half dozen times, stabbed several times, crashed his motorcycle into a building, had a finger amputated then cauterized, he was branded and punched close to a thousand times.  That’s got to take it out of fellow.

Look I get it.  These movies provide a video game-like environment where the audience experiences the adrenaline rush of a non-stop first-person shooter experience.  And looked at from that point of view John Wick 3 gets the job done.  There are knife fights, endless gun fights, fist fights, dog fights, karate fights, there are even fights on motorcycles.  Some of the assassins even turn out to be fans of John and tell him during the battles that they really admire him and killing him isn’t personal, it’s just business.

And the end of the movie isn’t really an end.  It looks like just the end of round three.  But I’m not sure there will be a round four.  The net profit from the movie was only $89 million.  And as blockbusters go that’s small potatoes.  So, this might be the final installment of the adventures of John Wick.

As far as recommendations, see the first John Wick movie.  It’s the best one.  Unless that movie strikes you as incredibly fun don’t bother with the sequels.  Neither of them materially improves on the action and as far as storytelling they lack the emotional rationale of the first film.

One little interesting cinematic moment in the film is where an homage to the spaghetti western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is included.  Wick is in a gun store looking for a gun to defend himself with and he takes components from several revolvers and matches them together and listens to the gun’s action to see if the composite is smooth operating.  Of course, he barely has time to use the gun before abandoning for the next scene so it is purely a staged moment in the film.  But I still liked it.

The End is in Sight

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Tuesday is the end of my ten-day ordeal.  A Chinese water torture of sorts.  Tomorrow will feel like being beaten for twelve hours with a bag full of oranges but knowing that only a single day stands between me and freedom makes me anxious to get it started.  I anticipate catastrophic failure, mob violence and accusations of mopery and dopery.  But it’s as if I can see the daylight shining through the hole punched through the Earth by the screaming asteroid of doom.  So, I am almost giddy with anticipation.  Bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

I read most of the news today and other than that Miller Beer manifesto for sucking all the joy out of men drinking beer, I didn’t see anything all that exciting.  There were all the lefty rags admonishing Trump and DeSantis, “Let’s you and him fight!”  And there was that idiot Durham with his 300-page report confirming that the FBI started the Russia-gate investigation without any evidence and yet without any criminal or professional consequences for the conspirators.  There were all the economic warnings of the impending financial meltdown.  There was Biden claiming he was going to prevent the millions of immigrants that he invited to the border from coming in, somehow.  There was the ridiculous budget battle between McCarthy and Biden.

And all sorts of other apocalyptic headlines.  But none of them were ready for prime time quite yet.  I’m curious to see if McCarthy scares Biden into creating a budget.  That would be a major accomplishment.  But we’ll have to wait.

The rest of it is just stuffing to separate the beginning and end of these news sites.  It’s something to keep these journalists off the crack pipe.  Or is it fentanyl now?

I was getting Camera Girl some cold medicine at Wally-mart and I went past the $5 bin of DVDs.  And I spotted a copy of John Wick 1.  Now I saw it when it came out and kinda, sorta enjoyed it.  I mean, it’s so cartoonish that I enjoyed it as a cartoon.  And when the second one came out, I rented it.  And it was too cartoonish to enjoy.  The volume of bullets flying and the sheer numbers of people being shot is dizzying.  It almost gives you motion sickness.  I missed the third one.  And now there’s a fourth one coming out.  So, seeing that copy in the remainder bin of venerable old John Wick 1 made me feel nostalgic for the comfortable 5X speed that I remember from that classic.  After my ordeal is over tomorrow, I’m going to find two hours or whatever it was and watch Keanu Reeves do whatever it is that he does in motion pictures.  Sure, it’s stupid and sure it’s not acting but so what?  Where is there acting anymore?  Certainly not on tv.

Of late Camera Girl has been watching some of the innumerable and interchangeable cop and fireman series that are sprinkled across prime-time network tv.  Once in a while she’ll have one on while I’m in the room and recently I’ve discovered what these shows have become in the last ten years or so.  They’re soap operas.  The most important component of the plot is the girl cops or fire girls or NCIS girls emoting about their feeling to their male counterparts or talking to the other girls about which boy they’re in love with.  Honestly, this is what the women of America think a police precinct or firehouse or SWAT team is all about.  It’s completely unwatchable and I have chastised Camera Girl for her horrible taste in entertainment but being a girl herself she can’t see the problem.  So, I’ve asked her to find some time when I’m out of the house or in a coma to watch this sort of dreck.

So Wednesday I’ll resurface and try to have something somewhat clever to say.  But for now, it’s horror and anticipation that holds me in sway.  Enjoy your Tuesday.  We who are about to die salute you.

John Wick 2 – A Movie Review

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Earlier I reviewed John Wick.  And he killed everyone in sight and got a new dog, so story over and he lived (or bled to death) happily ever after.  But, doggone it, John Wick must have made some money so there’s gonna be a John Wick 2.

I watched it last night.  I even rented John Wick, just in case I needed to be refreshed on the details.  But it all came flooding back.  As luck would have it, there’s an evil crime lord who has a marker from John Wick that he can cash in if John comes out of retirement.  Wouldn’t you know it!  John declines.  Crime Lord blows up John’s house with some kind of a grenade launcher which based on its effect must involve anti-matter.  John is blown clear of the house (relatively unharmed mind you) and luckily for the Crime Lord the dog is unharmed.  You would think after what John did to a Crime Lord in the first movie word would have gotten out to the Crime Lord community.  Alas it hadn’t.

The remainder of the movie is the body count involved in first fulfilling his debt to the above referenced Crime Lord and then completing the vendetta against this self-same Crime Lord.  It is a ponderous count.

So, to review my take on this series, it’s based on John Wick being possessed of ultra-fast reflexes and a machine-like precision at killing men, whether with gun, knife, hands, head or pencil.  In fact, I think in one scene he stabbed his opponent to death with a rather blunt pistol.  In John Wick 2 he gets to mix it up a bit, in that a couple of his opponents are women (I think).

So, if you’ve already seen John Wick why would you need a second dose of the same?  The innovation in the second film is speed.  In this second outing a mere ten or twenty opponents would only be a momentary diversion, perhaps something for him to keep busy with between brushing his teeth and flossing.  During one sequence he’s armed with three guns (a pistol, a fully automatic rifle and a shot gun) and he’s barely able to reload anything fast enough to keep from running out of ammo.  And he’s not wasting bullets.  Amazingly, no matter what lighting conditions, distance or direction every shot is a head shot kill.  Sometimes he’s so busy that he’s forced to kill his opponents with one hand while reloading with the other.  And sometimes he’s so hard-pressed that he has to kill other attackers with a gun that’s still being held by a guy he’s also throttling.  It’s a dizzying dance of death that goes on and on and on.

The twist in the plot is that the Crime Lord has put out a seven million dollar price on John’s head and apparently all eight million inhabitants of New York City are hit men (and women).  So wherever he goes, subway, museum or restaurant, he’s assaulted by multiple assassins trying to collect on the contract.  So, knowing he needs help to survive he goes to the King of the Homeless (played by his old Matrix buddy Lawrence Fishburne) and is brought to the location of the Crime Lord.  The catch is he’s only given one gun and it only has a seven-bullet clip.  That would only last John Wick for at most four seconds.  But he agrees and away he goes.  The finale is another ballet of bullets.  Only this time exchanging guns with his victims is a pressing detail.

John Wick 2 is full of growth for Keanu as an actor.  At one point he makes a joke ( it’s about a knife in an aorta).  And he gets to banter with his friends and enemies in multiple languages, English, Russian, Italian and American Sign Language for the Deaf (one of his victims is a deaf woman, I think).  He truly is a Man for All Seasons.

By the end of the movie John Wick has now broken the code of the Continental Hotel and Hitman’s Club.  He is given an hour’s grace before all the same bounty hunters as earlier are coming to kill him.  We last see him heading south (I think) out of Central Park.  And he’s moving pretty fast considering the beating the movie has inflicted on him.

So, I once again recommend this new John Wick movie.  It provides fair recompense for your time and money in the form of ludicrous speed gangland killing.

My only worry is what about John Wick 3?  Based on the increase in killing speed between the movies, in the next one he’ll either have to upgrade his brain and body with cybernetic replacements or he’ll have to put in a lot of overtime.  I guess if he can learn to kill people while simultaneously performing his other daily activities he can get his quota up high enough.  Showering, shaving, eating breakfast, talking on the phone.  These things can certainly be done one-handed.  Working out at the gym could get tricky but I guess he could try shooting a gun with his foot while working the Lat-Machine.

John Wick – A Movie Review

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Keanu Reeves is a bizarre phenomenon. He’s been making movies since the mid-eighties and is 54 years old.  Yet I think of him as basically Ted from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  It’s the same halting voice and basic appearance.  In the interim he has starred in a number of money making movies, most notably The Matrix.  And he has become an action movie hero.  The John Wick movies are the latest extension of this venture.

I watched John Wick probably a year after it was in the theaters.  The premise was of course ridiculous.  John is your basic retired uber-hitman.  He gave up his hum-drum nine to five life of garroting and mangling the enemies of his New York Russian Mafia Crime Lord to live a peaceful idyllic life in his spectacular suburban estate with his beautiful but short-lived wife.  She dies of cancer shortly before the movie’s start but is thoughtful enough to have a puppy delivered to John near the opening scene.  So, you get it, dead wife reaches beyond the grave and bestows gift of love to retired hitman?  Memory of dead wife and gift she left him is most important thing in his life.  Check.  Also, loves vintage sports cars and ’69 Mustang is second most important thing in his life.  Check.  The set up.  Check.

Somehow, completely coincidentally and without knowing who he’s dealing with, the son of John Wick’s crime lord ex-boss accidentally victimizes the now retired hitman and starts a vendetta by stealing his car and killing his dog.  Well I guess it could have been more blatant.  He might have gone for the trifecta and castrated Wick while he was at it.

After this the film embarks on an odyssey of shooting, stabbing and punching pleasure.  You’d think after the first couple of dozen gangsters are dispatched that it would start to get boring and repetitive.  But the hyper-kinetic fight scenes are strangely fascinating.  It was as if you were watching one of those loops they include with a first-person shooter game that show how someone who has memorized the game can dispatch all the enemies one by one in incredible speed and precision.  It’s the extension of the concept seen at the end of the Matrix where Neo has gotten the hang of his abilities and is fighting Agent Smith with one hand held behind his back, parrying every punch without even looking because his reflexes are an order of magnitude faster than his opponent’s.

Anyway, this goes on for the balance of the movie.  The Russian Crime Lord is kind of entertaining and we are introduced to the Continental Hotel and Club that caters to hitmen and forbids them to kill each other on its grounds under penalty of membership termination (which coincidentally includes death).  It’s lots of fun and there are gold coins and lots of automatic weapons and views of iconic Manhattan locations.

By the end of the movie, at least John’s absorbed a lot of damage from fighting the dozens of hit men who stand between him and the Crime Lord that needs killing.  So, you know it wasn’t easy.  And he finds a new dog.  So, balance is restored to the universe and John Wick can go back into a peaceful retirement since everyone is dead.

So, what’s my opinion?  Was it good.  Well, obviously, it has to be compared by the standards of the genre it belongs in.  It’s an action adventure.  It’s almost a comic book movie.  From that perspective, it’s highly successful.  It’s as full of action as it’s possible to imagine.  The fight choreography is meticulous and the cinematography is highly effective.  And he’s only killing bad guys.  He’s the strong silent man bringing down vengeance on his enemies.  He’s the modern-day Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood but without the occasional complete sentence.

I liked it.  Admittedly it’s a guilty pleasure.  Basically, it’s an atavistic response to injustice.  Take justice into your own hands and clean house.  Scratch the veneer and we’re still just cavemen.  Sure, we’ve got indoor plumbing and 401K plans but the mindless primitive lurks right below the surface.  Once you recognize that, you can jump right in and enjoy John Wick for what it is.  High Octane Revenge.

John Wick 2 – A Movie Review

21SEP2017 Update

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So today is the last full day of summer.  Gahhh!  The horror begins soon so it’s time to have fun while we can.  Saturday I’ll have my two older grandsons over for a Lord of the Rings marathon.  I think the extended version comes to about eleven hours.  Breaking it up with grilled cheese sandwiches for them and corned beef and swiss for me, it will be a full day.  Dinner will be another fan favorite spaghetti and meat balls.  Camera Girl will do the cooking but abstain from the cinema.  She’s a Tolkien agnostic, heaven help her.

As anyone who faithfully reads my reviews knows I consider Justified the most consistently well written and actualized tv drama I’ve ever seen.  I have a theory that it’s because the source material is much better than that of the typical (or even superior) tv-show.  So, I’m putting it to the test.

Right now, I’m reading Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens novels and short stories.  I read the short story “Fire in the Hole” that was the basis for the first episode of Justified.  The other stories in the collection (of the same name) were all very good too.  Leonard has an enormous reputation as one of the most popular crime writers.  And he has had over twenty of his books made into movies (not counting the tv series Justified).  Based on all that I figure I’ll find out what all the hype is about.  So, I want to see how I like his stuff.  So far, I’m impressed.

The political scene continues to boil like the spaghetti pot I’ll be involved with on Saturday.  Trump continues to engage all important events in his typical iconic and bombastic style.  Of course, you’d have to be made of stone not to be nervous about all the various balls in the air.  But I’ve learned to give Trump some time to get things done in his own way.  After all he is herding particularly annoying cats (and rats).  The right-wing folks are going through some growing pains on the various sites.  Hopefully it’ll sort itself out sooner than later.  I take a sort of neutral position on these things and wait to see how things are settled.

On the photography front I’ve added the ability to embed photos in the comments so go ahead if something in a post inspires a photo of your own.  The plug-in that makes this possible has the following instructions:

This plugin embeds image links in comments with the img tag so the images are visible in your comment timeline.

Image formats supported:

  1. .jpg
  2. .gif
  3. .png

 

I’m not an expert on this computer stuff so I’ll do my best to get things to work but have patience if there are problems.

On the review front, I’m going to write something on my recent toe-dip into anime.  In addition to my recent viewing of Cowboy Bebop I watched Ghost in the Shell 2.0.  I’ll share my thoughts.

Other film ideas, I rented the second John Wick film and I’ll put together my thoughts on both films after watching it, maybe this weekend.

I haven’t decided what sf&f book to read next.  Suggestions are always welcome.