John Wick, film review: Dialogue is strictly secondary as Keanu Reeves seeks revenge

(15) Chad Stahelski, 101 mins Starring: Keanu Reeves, Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane, Alfie Allen

Keanu reloaded: Reeves returns to action in ‘John Wick’ (David Lee; John Wick PPNY, Inc.)

John Wick was made by stuntmen – and it shows. Its director, Chad Stahelski, was a stunt co-ordinator and double for Keanu Reeves on The Matrix. He and his partner David Leitch run a top Hollywood stunt company. They've delivered a film which plays like one prolonged, glorified action sequence, in which dialogue and characterisation are strictly secondary. "He stole John Wick's car, sir, and killed his dog," one character explains to a mobster boss, summing up the entire plot in the process.

Wick (Reeves) is a retired hitman whose wife has just died. When delinquent Russian-American Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen from Game of Thrones) makes off with his Mustang and takes liberties with the Andrex ad-like puppy his wife left him to help him cope with his grief, Wick vows revenge. There are some tremendously stylish sequences here and some colourful character, including Willem Dafoe as a very ghoulish assassin and Michael Nyqvist as a well- spoken Russian thug.

Reeves, though, is strangely cast: he is just too genial and laidback a presence to make a convincing angel of death. As Wick leaves corpse after corpse in his wake, the storytelling becomes more and more preposterous – its saving grace is the sheer operatic excess of the bloodletting.