John Wick (2014)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2014
	Director: Chad Stahelski (stunt or action coordinator on the Matrix trilogy, 300, Iron Man 2, Tron Legacy, ...), David Leitch
	Actors: Keanu Reeves (The Matrix 1-3, 47 Ronin), Michael Nyqvist (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 1-3), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones TV-series), Willem Dafoe (Platoon, Spiderman)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, Thriller
	Conditions of visioning: 10.01.2016, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: An ex-hitman (Reeves) comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that took everything from him.
Review: John Wick looks like it was adapted from a comic book or will be adapted into a video game, but only the latter is true and its look is in fact derived from the influences of the directors that include Mangas, video games but also spaghetti western and Kung-Fu (and they both worked on The Matrix trilogy with Reeves).  I liked the gunfights in this movie although they do look too much like a video game: indeed John Wick consistently shoots his enemies with a few bullets to the chest and one to the head, while those poor bastards don't even manage to wound him even slightly. This is quite unrealistic similarly to what I have already commented on The Expendables 3, but at least in John Wick there is blood, lots of it. But even though, I found the choreography of the gunfights a bit too "organized". The vengeance story is half-way between Cronenberg's A History of Violence and Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon, the first one for the backstory and the second for the motivation for revenge and the urban setting. What disturbed me most in the movie and prevented me from really liking it is exactly that motivation that I found week: the bad guys didn't even kill his wife but only his dog, and what a coincidence that it's the son of his ex-boss (nice Alfie "Theon/Reek" Allen from Game of Thrones) that did it. Apart from that, it is quite a nice energetic Action shooter, with an original atmosphere like in the hotel/bar reserved to gangsters and in which they have to respect some rules. This is the kind of detail that made me think the movie was adapted from a graphic novel. Another nice aspect is the Electro soundtrack composed by Tyler Bates (known for his work on Rob Zombie's Halloween, Halloween II, and The Devil's Rejects, on Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, and Sucker Punch, on Neil Marshall's Doomsday and on Ti West's The Sacrament) and Joel J. Richard or by the DJ Le Castle Vania. Last time I remember liking a modern soundtrack was the one created by the Chemical Brothers for Hanna, without mentioning the one by the Daft Punk for Tron: Legacy of course.
Rating: 6 /10