You Are Already Dead

You Are Already Dead

A Binge-Watcher’s Reckoning with the John Wick Franchise

I watched all four John Wick movies over two days. I counted, loosely, somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred on-screen deaths. I have seen more people get shot in the head, stabbed with a pencil, run over by a car, thrown off a balcony, hammered with a knife hilt in a way that looks more exhausting than just stabbing someone, and fed to Belgian Malinois than I have in any other context in my adult life outside of the news, and the news does not have this kind of choreography.

I have thoughts.

Chapter One: In Which a Man’s Dog is Killed and We All Agree He’s Allowed to Do This

Let’s start with the premise, because the premise is genuinely audacious. John Wick opens by killing a puppy. Not a villain’s puppy. Your puppy. The puppy his dead wife arranged to be delivered to him as a final gift so he would have something to love after she was gone. The filmmakers looked at an audience full of adults who had made their peace with screen violence and said, “We’re going to test your actual limits now.” They killed the puppy in the first fifteen minutes.

It worked. It worked so completely that every single subsequent killing in four movies of increasingly operatic carnage is entirely justified in the viewer’s moral ledger. Three hundred people die so that John Wick can process his grief, and we are with him every step of the way, because of a beagle puppy that existed on screen for about four minutes. That is filmmaking. That is emotional manipulation of the highest possible craft, and I mean that as a genuine compliment.

Here is the weird thing about Chapter 1 though: Vigo Tarasov is supposed to be a legendary crime boss who runs the entire Russian criminal underworld in New York City. He has heard of John Wick. He is genuinely terrified of John Wick. He gives a monologue about John Wick that is one of the better pieces of villain exposition in recent action cinema, the one about asking the Boogeyman who he’s afraid of. He literally gives his own son to Wick rather than fight over it.

And then, having watched this man kill roughly eighty of his employees over a single night, financially ruined and at the end of his rope, Vigo decides to fight him personally. In the rain. In what amounts to a slapping contest. This man, who has never once shown any capacity for personal violence, decides that now, after all of this, he is going to be the one to end John Wick. And the movie gives them a prolonged fight that a clearly exhausted, shot-multiple-times Wick barely wins against an old man who probably should not be able to throw a punch.

I choose to believe Vigo simply had a death wish and this was his way of making it look like an accident.

Chapter Two: The Lore Expands, the Suit Gets Better, and Nobody Learns Anything

Chapter 2 opens with Wick recovering his car from Vigo’s brother, Abram, played by the perpetually underutilized Peter Stormare, who is doing about nine thousand percent more acting than this scene requires and the gods bless him for it.

The car, by the time Wick gets it back, looks like it has been through the Battle of Kursk. He drives it home. He hands it to his mechanic. He is done with all of this, he says, with the puppy and the intention of a quiet life, and then literally the next scene a man shows up at his door to ruin everything.

This is the structural heartbeat of the entire franchise: John Wick wants to be left alone. Someone does not leave him alone. Hundreds of people die. John Wick wants to be left alone again. Repeat until the budget runs out or Keanu Reeves’ knees give out, whichever comes first.

Chapter 2 introduces the suit. The bullet-resistant suit, the franchise’s hand-wave, the thing that exists because the movies made a deal with the audience early on that Wick can survive an inhuman amount of damage and needed something to point at when you raised your hand to ask questions. The suit says: we know, we know, just go with it. This is actually smart. It is openly fake in a way that allows you to accept it and move on.

What Chapter 2 also introduces is The Lore, which is one of the franchise’s most interesting and most quietly absurd achievements. The Continental Hotel. The High Table. The blood oaths. The gold coins that function as currency in a shadow economy of assassination. The administrative infrastructure of murder, which turns out to involve a surprising amount of paperwork, tailored clothing, and sommeliers. The world of John Wick is one where there exists a parallel civilization of killers operating entirely within and around normal society, and normal society simply does not notice or does not care. Police are largely decorative. The general public watches elaborate gunfights in train stations with the mild curiosity of people witnessing a minor traffic incident.

This is absolutely insane and it is also the best thing about these movies.

What Chapter 2 also does, at its ending, is close the door. Wick kills Santino D’Antonio on Continental grounds, with full knowledge of what it will cost him. He has been told explicitly. He does it anyway. From that point on there is no version of this story where Wick gets to stop. He has made a choice that forecloses every other choice, and the franchise spends its remaining two films drawing out the consequences of one man doing one deliberate, irreversible thing. That is a structural decision that looks simple and is not.

Chapter Three: Halle Berry’s Dogs Deserve Their Own Franchise

Parabellum is where the franchise fully commits to the bit, which is to say it becomes completely unhinged in the most deliberate and enjoyable way possible. We now learn that Wick’s real name is not John Wick, that he is from Belarus, that he was raised in some kind of murder orphanage that functions like a cross between a ballet academy and a Special Forces training facility, and that he has hidden caches of gold coins and plot devices in locations around the globe for exactly this kind of emergency.

The Casablanca sequence is where the movie hands the belt to two Belgian Malinois and largely lets Halle Berry stand nearby shouting commands at them while Wick does some stuff. Those dogs fight with more tactical intelligence, more commitment, and more screen presence than most human actors bring to an action film. They bite things. They climb people. They solve problems. They are very good boys who have been trained to aim for the crotch, specifically, with a consistency that borders on philosophical. They should have received their own spinoff immediately.

After the fight, Berry drops Wick at the edge of the desert so he can go wander off to find the Elder. There is a small amount of water left in a bottle. The dogs have been watered. Wick presumably has not, given that he was just in a massive gunfight. Berry swishes the remaining water around in her mouth and spits it back into the bottle and hands it to him, a gesture that communicates, with remarkable efficiency, that she does not particularly like this man, has helped him entirely because of obligation, and would prefer he now leave. It is disgusting. It is also a great character beat for someone the movie has no more time for.

Then there is Mark Dacascos as Zero, the assassin sent to kill Wick, who cannot decide from scene to scene whether he is playing a terrifying ninja master or a delighted fanboy who has finally gotten to meet his hero. The answer, it turns out, is both simultaneously, and it is the most fun anyone is visibly having in the entire franchise. Zero is a legitimately superior fighter who could absolutely have ended Wick at several points and chooses, repeatedly, not to, because the plot requires it, and Dacascos plays this limitation with enough charm that you forgive the movie for it entirely.

Lawrence Fishburne returns as the Bowery King, doing what can only be described as Subway Morpheus, and at one point Keanu Reeves says “guns, lots of guns,” which is either a charming nod to The Matrix or the filmmakers briefly forgetting which franchise they were making. Given that both films star Keanu Reeves as a mild-mannered man who turns out to be the most dangerous person on the planet and is sustained by the power of believing in himself, the confusion is understandable.

Also: Wick falls off a building. Ten stories. He survives this for Chapter 4.

Chapter Four: We Are Making Art Now, Also Everyone Dies

Chapter 4 opens on what is clearly the end of a training montage, with Wick punching a board in the desert, because the screenwriters looked at the ending of Chapter 3 and thought “he needs to be powered up before the final arc, like a video game protagonist between levels.” This is not a criticism. This is an observation about what these movies have become, which is something that rhymes with video games in the same way that a cathedral rhymes with a parking garage. Same basic concept. Very different execution.

The Bowery King reappears, in the depths of whatever enormous underground room he uses for these occasions, complete with a burn barrel because of course he has those, and he brings Wick a suit. Black shirt under the jacket.

Donnie Yen arrives as Caine, a blind assassin and old friend of Wick’s, and delivers approximately three times more soul and warmth than the movie technically requires of him, because Donnie Yen is incapable of being in a scene without elevating it. Bill Skarsgard does the villain as a kind of elongated sociopath in couture, oscillating between menacing and sniveling depending on whether or not Wick is in the room, which is genuinely the right call for this character in this franchise at this point. Hiroyuki Sanada shows up to play Hiroyuki Sanada, which is to say an honorable, beautifully composed warrior type who is on the wrong side but comes around by the end, because Hiroyuki Sanada has been playing variations of this character his entire career and he is very good at it and nobody is complaining.

The Paris sequence is one of the genuinely great action set pieces in modern cinema. The overhead shot of Wick fighting his way through an apartment building, the camera floating above him like a bird watching a particularly violent ant farm, presented as a continuous sequence even though it is not, is extraordinary filmmaking dressed up as an action movie. It is patient. It is choreographed with the precision of a Busby Berkeley number except everyone is dying. It is shot like someone decided that if you are going to make a video game into a movie, you should commit to the aesthetic completely.

Before the final duel, the Bowery King brings Wick another suit. This time, the shirt is white.

Black shirt, then white shirt. Darkness, then light. The Bowery King is dressing Wick for two different things: the first suit is for war, for the Wick who is still inside the machine, fighting for survival. The second suit is for something else, something the movie gestures toward without naming, for a man who is about to climb 222 steps toward a church at dawn to fight the last fight on his own terms. Whatever these movies have been doing with their mythology and their borrowed imagery, Chapter 4 is where they stop hiding it. They are doing this through the medium of menswear. This is insane and it absolutely works.

Keanu Reeves is 59 years old in this movie and doing most of his own stunts. There are moments where you can catch him counting the beats, getting slightly ahead of the choreography, reading the next line off the internal teleprompter of a man putting in extraordinary physical effort while trying to remember his blocking. The stilted delivery, the slight disconnect between the words and the man saying them, these have been present in Keanu Reeves’ performances since the beginning. The John Wick franchise has figured out how to make that quality work for the character rather than against it. Wick does not quite seem to be present in his body. He seems to be running slightly outside of time, slightly outside of the world. That is not a performance limitation. That is John Wick.

The Mythology, or: These Movies Have Been a Classical Epic This Entire Time and You Didn’t Notice

Here is the thing the franchise has been doing quietly since the first film, the thing it never explains because explaining it would ruin it. Chad Stahelski confirmed it in interviews, but the movies themselves trust you to feel it without being told: John Wick is a piece of classical mythology wearing a very nice suit.

The character Charon, played by the late Lance Reddick with a warmth and quiet menace the films never adequately acknowledged, shares his name with the ferryman of the Greek underworld. The gold coins the franchise uses as currency are not quirky world-building. In Greek burial practice, coins were placed in the mouths of the dead to pay Charon for passage across the River Styx. Winston, the Continental’s manager, is confirmed by the director to be Zeus. The Bowery King is Apollo. The High Table has twelve seats. The character named Ares is exactly what Ares always was in Greek mythology: powerful, terrifying, and ultimately just an instrument of someone else’s ambition. The blind Caine in Chapter 4 echoes Tiresias. The character who calls himself Nobody identifies with “No one,” the trick Odysseus used to escape the Cyclops. Wick himself, the director said plainly, is Odysseus, trying to get home.

The Latin is not decoration. “Parabellum,” the subtitle of Chapter 3, comes from the Roman adage si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, prepare for war. The graveyard epitaph in Chapter 4 reads “Vivamus moriendum est,” from Seneca: let us live, for we must die. The franchise’s entire thesis is engraved in stone in an assassin’s cemetery, and most people walked right past it.

The whole edifice, the hotels, the coins, the blood oaths, the Adjudicators and Harbingers and Elders, is the machinery of a divine order made flesh, a mythology retrofitted for a world where gods have traded Olympus for the penthouse suite and the River Styx runs through the lobby of a very nice hotel in New York.

All of which should raise a question, if you have been paying the kind of attention the franchise quietly rewards.

The dog that Wick takes from the vet clinic at the end of Chapter 1, the one that follows him through three more films, the one present at his side across hundreds of deaths and two continents and one ten-story fall, the one that disappears before the final sequence in Paris without comment or explanation.

It has no name. Not once, in four films, does anyone give it a name.

That is not an oversight. These movies do not make oversights. That is a detail sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to ask why.

The answer is in Part Two.

Four movies. Approximately four hundred deaths. One puppy. One bottle of backwash. Zero regrets.