The John Wick series has cracked the video game movie code.

As you know, movies based on video games generally are… not very good. Sometimes it’s because there’s no budget, or because the script and actors aren’t up to snuff, or because the director is horrible*. But video game movies persist in being bad even when there’s money and competence.  But, as I said: the John Wick series has figured out the trick. If you want to make a video game movie, don’t base it on an existing video game.

John Wick 2, in other words, is the epitome of a movie made in the aesthetic of an over-the-shoulder shooter with almost no role-playing potential, a linear plot, and a fondness for cut-scenes.  That was not a criticism. I am legitimately impressed that the director and writers realized that audiences would readily forgive, say, a running stealth battle in a subway using silenced pistols that nobody else in the subway noticed. And why shouldn’t audiences do that? Happens all the time in video games.  And that’s true about everything else that’s superficially absurd in the film, ranging from the hyper-legalistic framework of the assassins’ community to the fact that there is an assassins’ community, and apparently everybody in NYC works for it**.

I say ‘superficially’ because none of it is absurd, in context of the film; it’s just absurd when it’s compared to real life. But many things in video games are also absurd when compared to real life; the problem there is that not everything that works in a video game also works in a movie, and it seems that the most awesome things in video games are quite often the things that simply look stupid when put on screen. But if you’re just making things up anyway that fit the video game aesthetic, you can pick the ones that also fit the cinematic aesthetic***.

So, the movie works. Keanu Reeves does a nice job playing a character who is just a little less under rigid self-control than he was in the first film, the secondary characters are pretty solid, and the action is the usual extended-shot ballet of murder. Go ahead and see it.

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t think that John Wick will survive a third movie.  I think that this is intentional and already blocked out by the writers, too.

*There’s a name in the center of that particular Venn Diagram, by the way.  And you all know perfectly well what that name is.

**Except for that one group.  They’re off doing… something else.

***I’m going to guess here that, if there is a John Wick novelization, it probably sucks.