[Not A Fiction] Things I'm Unhinged About: John Wick

A ballet of murder

Content note: one use of an anti-gay slur.

If you enjoy this article, consider checking out my hard science fiction/lesbian romance/troubled teen camp novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record or my other fiction.¹

This article is about John Wick 4, plus my skimming of The John Wicki. I’m not going to watch anything else in the John Wick series. I feel I have had the John Wick experience and don’t need to explore it any further in order to properly obsess. Especially since I’m told those other movies don’t have Donnie Yen.

Notes That Don’t Fit Elsewhere

Keanu Reeves spends the entirety of John Wick with the exact affect of a fast-food employee who is six hours into a split shift and dealing with an entitled customer who wanted three, THREE! pickles on her burger but instead there are FOUR and she is going to speak to your manager. He is so very, very tired. I want an alternate-universe fanfic where everything is exactly the same except instead of being an assassin John Wick works at McDonalds. Every time he thinks he’s out they get him back in (by offering him a ten-cent-per-hour raise).

John Wick 4 has some of the worst Signals From Fred that I’ve ever seen. “You can’t just murder everyone in the secret assassin underground,” every non-John-Wick character says. “Your motivations are increasingly unclear, and none of your actions are obviously connected to them. We’re starting to suspect that you just like killing people. You’ve got to come up with some satisfying end to the franchise. We’re begging you not to make there be another John Wick movie.”

The director of John Wick cites Bob Fosse and Gene Kelly as major influences, which I can see. Fight choreography is choreography. To me, Bob Fosse’s choreography is notable for its elegance and its precision: every gesture is intended to convey. Fosse also strikes me as a particularly expressive choreographer. As an example, consider the viciously sarcastic war in Pippin. You might say “how do you make choreography about a war be viciously sarcastic?” but seriously just look at those hip thrusts:

The fight scenes in John Wick are similarly elegant, precise, and expressive.

The John Wick director loving Bob Fosse is an example of one of my pet takes, which is that all media is created by the kind of people who grew up wanting to make that media in high school. Rock stars are probably actually cool. But writers are shy, overly intense egomaniacs who keep ignoring you to read. Actors did the school play and have strong opinions about Steven Sondheim. And this lovely fellow from Zootopia was animated by someone who wants to fuck a tiger:

No matter how manly your media is, it was created by a fag. And that’s beautiful.

Is It Good?

Mu. The John Wick series does not so much have “dialogue” or “characters” or “worldbuilding.” There is a desultory attempt at a theme in John Wick 4 but it’s really just embarrassing for everyone involved. John Wick approaches xkcd’s ideal of the pure action movie, although with Keanu instead of River Tam. John Wick shoots a fire-grenade-thing. People have longbows, and then whack each other in the head with longbows, even though longbows are clearly designed for long-distance fighting. People fall down an enormous flight of stairs, and the cameraperson uses a continuous shot to show that a real human being actually did fall down all two hundred and something stairs. Donnie Yen is there.

Does one really need characterization in a movie? Is it not enough for Keanu Reeves to do murders?

Donnie Yen has an ambiguous effect on my enjoyment of movies. I’m happy when he’s there, but when he’s offscreen I’m sad because Donnie Yen could be in the scene but isn’t. This is called the hedonnie treadmill.

Pedantic Nitpicking

Come on. You should be willing to pay way more than forty million dollars to kill John Wick. The value of a statistical life is like nine million dollars! You’ve put so much money into training all of these assassins, all of which John Wick just straight-up murdered! If I were an assassin and someone tried to pay me only forty million dollars to kill John Wick, I would be like “I like being alive” and stay home.

I realize you may have liquidity issues that prevent you from paying a billion dollars to the killer of John Wick, but the marker—a token which indicates that a particular member of the secret assassin underground owes you a favor—has already been established in previous films to deal with this exact problem. Promise people twenty markers on various members of The Table if they kill John Wick. Done.

If I ran a secret assassin hotel, I would not put irreplaceable artwork in my hotel where someone might have a firefight, or at the very least I would move it to a warehouse if I think John Wick might show up.

Worldbuilding

I hate the worldbuilding of this movie so much. It manages to beat Divergent for the position of Least Economically Sensical Piece Of Media I Have Ever Consumed.

The assassins buy things with gold coins. However, they universally pay one gold coin per service: a knife, a gun, a single night’s stay at a hotel, a bar tab, or the cleanup of a dead body. These things cost different amounts! You guys need smaller coins, maybe?

What’s more, John Wick’s gold coins canonically buy more than another character’s. Does the assassin underground mint unique gold coins for each assassin? Can I pay for my goods with one of John Wick’s gold coins? Is there a computer program somewhere where I can look up the exchange rate between John Wick coins and Caine coins? Are the coins a way of marking who owes favors to whom, and if so why do we have markers, a totally different way of marking who owes favors to whom? If I gave you a gold coin to cover my $200 bar tab, and a different gold coin to cover my $2000 gun purchase, do I owe you the same size of favor for both? How do you keep track? Why would you do a monetary system like this?

I hate this.

If we ignore all established canon about the gold coins, then we are faced with the existence of the Central Bank of the Assassin Underground. Does the assassin underground have a fiat currency? Does the central bank need to maintain a policy which balances unemployment and inflation? Is the assassin underground on the gold standard? Does it have inflation when gold stocks increase more rapidly than the assassin underground economy does? Do they murder some gold mine owners as a crude form of monetary policy?

In fact, the experiences of the non-assassins are by far the most interesting part of these movies. It’s not just the central bankers. All kinds of jobs must, presumably, exist: headhunters, accountants, customer service representatives. What is it like to file the invoices for assassinations? Are there unpaid interns trying to break into the assassination-management field? Do the HR people have to develop in-house anti-sexual-harassment training to account for the fact that some harassers can murder you?

There are janitors who clean the Continental hotels. Do they know that the Continental hotels are the safehouses of the secret assassin underground? Are they taught during training about the “special guests” whose rooms shouldn’t be cleaned without explicit permission? Do they find bullet casings and blood stains there that they don’t ask questions about, because the last guy who asked questions disappeared?

What the fuck is it like to be vacationing in Japan and stay in the Continental hotel and then suddenly the concierge who helped you find tickets to Universal Studios has a katana and is killing people in the lounge?

How is any of this reported on the news? Is it covered up? How? Hundreds if not thousands of people have at least heard John Wick murdering people. What must the conspiracy-theory websites be like?

One of the most pressing questions to me is who, exactly, the assassin underground is assassinating. I have concluded that, in the world of John Wick, talented and specially trained assassins are easily able to solo an entire company of soldiers. As such, most countries have only vestigial militaries. If one country wants to invade another, the typical approach is to hire assassins to kill all of the country’s leadership; of course, world leaders hire their own bodyguards to protect against assassination. The underground supplies both.

If they’ve replaced all the world’s militaries, the global assassin underground has about a two trillion dollar budget to play with, which is more than enough for as many hotel chains and central bankers as you please. Further, everyone knows the global assassin underground exists, just like in our world we know the military exists. The Continental hotels can charge a slight premium, because no assassin attacks will happen on the premises² and because the prospect of getting to actually meet an assassin is thrilling.

At the climax of John Wick 4, Parisians were cowering in their homes, glued to the news, which regularly updated them on whether it was safe to go outside. In spite of this, I doubt they'd switch to our system, in which ordinary nineteen-year-olds die in wars they barely understand. In the Wickiverse, conflicts almost exclusively kill the most powerful—world leaders and the assassins themselves.

Make Up A Guy To Get Mad At

You know, if you think about it, the John Wick series has the most prominent Russian Orthodox characters in Anglosphere pop culture.³ The Russian Orthodox priest has an AK-47 and shoots people. Is this an offensive portrayal? Does it matter that literally everyone in John Wick has a gun of some kind and shoots people with it? Are the Russian Orthodox just happy to be included?

I’m a Quaker and I’m supposed to be living out the Testimony of Peace. Does this mean I’m not supposed to like John Wick, a two-and-a-half-hour orgy of gorgeous violence? Shouldn’t we have a mediator listen to both John Wick’s and everyone else’s side of the story and try to come to a mutually agreeable situation that leaves everyone satisfied? Have Quakers sufficiently considered that movie violence is really really cool?

Lesbians, Space, or Atrocities?

Atrocities. Because of all the murder.

1. I hear that to sell fiction you’re supposed to incessantly go “buy my fiction? Have you bought my fiction yet? Please buy my fiction! Did you hear I have fiction, and you can buy it?” This sounded really annoying, but I figured it would be less annoying if attached to two thousand words of fannish nonsense about John Wick. If you’re just here for the announcements, simply set your email to filter out any email from this Substack that begins [Not A Fiction].

2. At least until John Wick 4.

3. I’m sorry to say that Dostoevsky is not a major feature of Anglosphere pop culture.