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[AuthenticM]

A must read for any film aficionado.

Let’s talk about the Kuleshov effect. Named for Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, this film editing technique was developed in in the early 20th century and explored how audiences would associate the same image with different emotions through the power of montage. Kuleshov cut between the same expressionless image of an actor and a series of images, including food and a beautiful woman. Audiences formed connections that didn’t exist in the performance and only in the edit – the man was hungry; the man was lustful. The performance did not change, but the association of other imagery implied that it did.

And this is why the natural blankness of Keanu Reeves is a gift to filmmakers who know how to utilize it. In the wrong hands, Reeves can appear wooden and stilted, an actor who can’t quite wrap his mouth around certain dialogue and his mind around certain characters. He doesn’t have an especially wide range. But what is here is a very specific set of skills, a mesmerizing deadpan, that sings when put in conjunction with the right associative material. The same zen-like blankness that allows Reeves to play a bumbling stoner also allows him to play a science fiction warrior or a hitman powered by pure vengeance. It’s all about teaming Reeves with a storyteller who understands that this is a leading man who works best as a cog in a larger machine, a tool rather than an engine. He’s the ultimate collaborator, a role made more powerful by his commitment to research and preparation.

John Wick: Chapter 2 opens with a strange image that we quickly forget about because the camera tilts down and drops us straight into a car chase. Footage of an old silent movie is projected on the wall of a Manhattan skyscraper. Who is watching it? Who is projecting it? Why are we seeing this? These questions are unimportant. It serves its purpose: it pays tribute to the performers to which the John Wick series pays tribute and it lets you know that yes, the movie is very much in on the joke.

One of the posters for John Wick: Chapter 2 (partially seen at the top of this article) features Reeves staring forward, poker face at the ready, with countless guns aimed straight at his noggin. The internet wryly pointed out that this looked an awful lot like imagery from Two-Gun Gussie, a 1918 silent comedy short starring the legendary Harold Lloyd. What those who haven’t given John Wick the time of day didn’t realize is that this was very intentional. Lloyd, like Buster Keaton and other early film comedians, is silent cinema’s equivalent of an action star. Without the use of dialogue, their jokes had to be purely visual and the most memorable of them involve genuine risk to all involved. The very nature of early film technology, including generally static cameras and the lack of sophisticated visual effects, meant that you just couldn’t fake certain things. Either you did it on camera, either you risked your life for the gag, or it didn’t happen.

The John Wick movies arrive a century after the heyday of the silent comedians, but they’re very much a throwback to the days where filmmakers had no choice but to put it all in camera. There are modern tricks in the John Wick movies and digital technology helps ensure the safety of performers and a smoother production process, but the spirit is very much alive in how Stahelski shoots his action and how his stunt team stages it. Shots are long and avoid extreme close-ups. The faces of performers, including Reeves, are kept in frame as much as possible to make sure we know they’re actually participating in the action. When someone takes a fall or when a car slams into them, the John Wick movies are making a promise: they’re not faking this and they’re not editing around people who don’t know how to fight. These are movies that understand the visceral, giddy thrill of watching someone survive a perilous and impossible situation, especially when that perilous and impossible situation feels real.

In order to return to the life he left behind, to avenge his puppy (i.e., to avenge the destruction of the promise of a new life), John Wick must descend a flight of stairs to his basement and smash the concrete floor with a sledgehammer, revealing the weapons he hid long ago. This very literal descent is no accident, as the fantasy action world of John Wick takes the concept of a “criminal underworld” very literally. By returning to the life he left behind, John is returning to Hell.

This isn’t the hell of Dante, though. It’s a less rigidly defined underworld, one that has more in common with Greek myth than Judeo-Christian depictions of the afterlife. While John was able to escape this realm, others are happy to live here and revel in it, to make a business out of it. It’s no accident that the Continental concierge Charon is named after the ferryman who carries newly arrived souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron, delivering them to the realm of Hades. It’s also no accident that the currency of this underworld are gold coins, as coins were once left upon the dead to pay for this passage. It’s certainly no accident that there’s a massive shootout in ancient Roman catacombs in the middle of John Wick: Chapter 2 – a resting place for the dead becomes a playground for the so-called living.

And that’s why death carries so little weight in the world of John Wick, why the lead character can murder hundreds of people without blinking an eye and why not even the most human characters blink in face of a gun barrel. They’re already dead. They’ve made a home in Hell. And as John learns in John Wick: Chapter 2, getting out of Hell isn’t as easy as simply walking back up those stairs.

Early in John Wick: Chapter 2, John sits with Santino D’Antonio in an art gallery, the camera framing them against a massive painting depicting a violent war scene. It’s a moment of calm in movie that is otherwise wall-to-wall with the sounds of gunfire and breaking bones. But here’s a reminder that violence isn’t just lurking around the characters at all times – it’s something that can be immortalized, that can be rendered on canvas and hung in a museum and appreciated for centuries to come.

Later, John engages in a gun battle in that very gallery, splattering the walls with the blood of his enemies. If a battle from hundreds of years ago can find space on a museum wall, is the work of John Wick also not worthy of artistic consideration? Is the most talented hitman to ever murder his way across New York not an artist in his own right? It’s Stahelski’s cheeky way of reclaiming the action movie as a genuine accomplishment, to stand up for a genre that gets shuffled under the rug. “This is art,” John Wick: Chapter 2 declares in its climax.

And it’s hard to argue with that. The John Wick movies borrow the language of B-movie schlock to build something grander, something more ambitious. They’re an example of modern myth-making, built on a foundation designed by silent movie comedians and ancient poets, a form further evolved by everyone from Jackie Chan to Arnold Schwarzenegger. They are near perfect examples of their genre and proof that mainstream American action cinema can be as compelling and rich beautifully crafted as any other movie.

Despite the long quotations, there's much more at the link. I urge you to read it. It shows just how fantastically-crafted the John Wick movies are, and how they are definite works of art.

From Slashfilm

 

[Theecliff]

great article OP, thanks for sharing. here's a vid from the movies with mikey series on youtube which elaborates on the mythology analogies touched upon in the article: https://youtu.be/i3P1ejh9pGs

i don't think either films are perfect but fuck they are such well done and satisfying pieces of cinema. even though i preferred the first film overall i couldn't help but sit back in wonderment during certain sequences in the sequel - it is showing off in all the best ways. i really wanna rewatch it in the cinema again now, think i might try and find a screening tonight.



i'm surprised at the lack of attention this thread has got

 

[AuthenticM]

great article OP, thanks for sharing. here's a vid from the movies with mikey series on youtube which elaborates on the mythology analogies touched upon in the article: https://youtu.be/i3P1ejh9pGs

i don't think either films are perfect but fuck they are such well done and satisfying pieces of cinema. even though i preferred the first film overall i couldn't help but sit back in wonderment during certain sequences in the sequel - it is showing off in all the best ways. i really wanna rewatch it in the cinema again now, think i might try and find a screening tonight.



i'm surprised at the lack of attention this thread has got

Thanks for the link.

And yeah, it's weird that no one else participated. And sad.

 

[Sojgat]

Pretty sure we had a thread about this piece already. I can't seem to find it though.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

Pretty sure we had a thread about this piece already. I can't seem to find it though.

I think it was posted in the John Wick 2 OT itself.

Great article. Anyone who liked Wick should read it all.

 

[wesleyshark]

Great article. Fantastic films. Can't wait for #3.

 

[New002]

Pretty sure we had a thread about this piece already. I can't seem to find it though.

I think it was posted in the John Wick 2 OT itself.

Great article. Anyone who liked Wick should read it all.

Yeah it was posted in the OT for John Wick 2 but didn't get a thread. Solid read.

 

[HyperZone<3]

Holy crap, that was solid as hell.

thanks OP. Sorry to come to this so much later on.

 

[AuthenticM]

Holy crap, that was solid as hell.

thanks OP. Sorry to come to this so much later on.

No problem!

Yeah, it really is a solid read. It really shows how much thought is put in making great action films. People often brush them off (and some movies certainly merit that), but you can't do this with these ones.