Keanu Reeves Handles Some Intruders in Clip from JOHN WICK
Pop quiz, hotshot. Masked men have entered your house. They all have guns and are trying to kill you. What do you do? What do you do??? If you’re Keanu Reeves in the new film John Wick, you take them all out like a boss. The soon to be released debut feature from stunt coordinators turned directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski stars Reeves as a retired hit man who gets back into the game to get revenge on the Russian mobsters who killed his beloved dog, who was a gift from his late wife. The clip below shows Reeves taking on those aforementioned intruders and gives us a much better sense of the pace of the action in this film than the rapid cut trailers they’ve released so far.
In Lucas Lowman’s review that we posted yesterday, he compared the frenetic action to the gun play in Equilibrium. I see a touch of the "gun-fu" aspect in this clip, but the camera work and editing in this are much more natural and fluid. From the 00:30 mark forward, you get these minimally cut takes that are shot fairly wide so the choreography can really shine. What I also really liked, and this is a credit to the directors and Reeves as an actor (say what you will about his dramatic range), is that you can see the decision making he’s doing while he’s fighting. I think other actors often fumble that aspect of doing action and complex choreography to the point of it looking more like a dance than a life or death situation.
John Wick also stars Willem Dafoe, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane, and Adrianne Palicki. It hits theaters October 24th.