The franchise has had its moments of cinematic spectacle.John Wick:Chapter 2‘s hall of mirrors ending,for example,which plays like Orson Welles’The Lady from Shanghai on steroids. OrParabellum’s early knife-throwing sequence,which goes on so long it feels like pure comedy. (I also appreciated the bit inParabellum where Keanu whips a couple of bad guys with his leather belt;removing your belt in the middle of a fight is such an underrated,old-school move.)
But for all its bountiful praise (the films average an astounding 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes), John Wick should really be one of those little-watched,B-grade franchises that get passed around high school hallways on a USB stick,not critically acclaimed multiplex fare. I mean,one guy atEntertainment Weekly even described it as “high art”. “High art” is a big call for a series of films whose screenplays are so threadbare they must total 12 pages combined.
There’s so little dialogue inJohn Wick that it sounds like sitting down for dinner in a loveless family. If the first film’s exposition was Tommy Wiseau-ish - all soft-focus crossfades like you’re watching those instructional cut scenes in a video game that everyone skips - the character development was non-existent. The recurring set-up for John Wick’s back-story is all bloated reputation,something like:“My son,did you say you upset John Wick?[falls to chair,head in hands] Quick,grab the guns,you have wrought chaos!” The only details we ever get about Wick’s pre-franchise deeds are that his nickname is “Baba Yaga” and that he once “killed three men with a pencil”. Considering that over the course of the movies he kills entire dynasties of Russians with his bare hands (again,over a dog),it’s a fairly unnecessary fable.
Also,why is “Baba Yaga” considered such an imposing nickname in the Wick-verse? Baba Yaga,as every child knows,is a scary old lady who lives in a hut with chicken legs. If I was John Wick,I’d cut a Russian for calling me Baba Yaga. If John Wick was played by,say,Catherine Deneuve rather than Keanu Reeves,then Baba Yaga would be an appropriate nickname,’cause she’s a (probably scary) older lady. Calling Keanu Reeves Baba Yaga just makes me think the typing monkeys who wrote the script didn’t know any other Slavic mythology and didn’t bother doing any research. I just Googled “What is the male equivalent of Baba Yaga”,and came up with “Koshchei Bessmertnyi,or Koshchei the Immortal. His name,from kost (“bone”),bears the notion of a dying and rising god,a deity who cyclically dies and is reborn.” That’s such a tough name! Can’t you picture some Eastern European kid pulling a quivering gun on Keanu and yelling “Argh,it’s Koshchei Bessmertnyi!” before jumping out the window to escape Wick’s wrath? Instead,we get trembling Russians pointing at Keanu and literally yelling,“Look,it’s the scary old lady who lives in a hut with chicken legs!”