I’m here for you fans and I’m doing this post because the owner of the bike shop I frequent (who called my reviews “legit”!) specifically requested John Wick 3.

I hadn’t seen either of the first two films so this became a big project. I’ll say off the bat that I liked them all, but don’t think they’re distinct enough from each other to warrant separate posts so I’ll just combine them. They’re telling one continuous story anyway.

The backstory involves a hitman who stepped away from the life after falling in love with a kind woman, whom he later married and remained with until her untimely death. Hmm, sound familiar Unforgiven fans?

The story itself is unique though. Said hitman, John Wick, is trying to enjoy a quiet life as a widower and a dog parent when a character played by Theon from Game of Thrones kills the dog and steals John’s nice car at the beginning of the first movie. John sets out for vengeance but the fact that he’s killing again leads to another assassin, at the start of the second movie, compelling him to carry out a hit using a thing called a “marker”.  Apparently that blood oath is part of their code of honor – you don’t do the favor asked of someone who has a marker on you and you will pay with your life. John of course can’t say no but the fallout from what happens next leads to him being on the run the whole third movie, which won’t be the last one either, as there is a fourth chapter schedule for a 2021 release.

So how good are these movies? Very!

First of all the fight choreography is amazing. Taken is the only other movie I can think of in recent memory that featured hand-hand-combat nearly as exciting and intense.

Second, if I had to describe these films in one word, it would be “stylish”. The operatic score, the cinematography that deftly combines light and darkness, the editing that manages to make the fights a thing of beauty by getting us to appreciate the details – it’s all amazing. Actually an even better word would be “elegant”, which might seem odd for an action movie but I’ve read that the works of legendary Asian auteur John Woo inspired these films.

Third, great cast. I alluded to Alfie Allen earlier. We also have Bridget Moynahan as John’s late wife, John Leguizamo as a likeable friend, Willem Dafoe in a chilling cameo, Common as a rival, Halle Berry as a fellow assassin, and Anjelica Huston as a source of help.  More important than any of them, we have Laurence Fishburne allowing us to have a Neo/Morpheus reunion and Ian McShane, the celebrity whom I’ll most look like in 30 years*, as the Big Bad/Big Good, depending on your perspective.

Of course most important of all is the star and this really is the Keanu Reeves show. I’d have to rewatch the movies to make certain but I’m pretty sure he’s in every scene.

Part of the reason I hadn’t watched the movies up until now is that I wasn’t much of a Keanu Reeves fan. I basically thought of him as the guy who goes “Whoa” but is way too old for that now. However, watching him here I really started to appreciate what a career he’s had. 

• Starred in as daring a movie as The River’s Edge when barely old enough to drink
• Played a title character in the Bill & Ted series, which, although not highbrow, was iconic enough that they’re even making another installment decades later
• Starred in Point Break, which has now been popular enough long enough that it deserves to be called a classic. Might actually watch it for the first time at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery next month
• Showed his acting chops again with a lead role in My Own Private Idaho that same year
• Shined in the gothic visual feast Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Tackled The Bard, appearing in Much Ado About Nothing, part of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean period
• Had the top role in one of the best movies of the 90s and one of the best action films of all time, Speed (and showed how smart he is by turning down the sequel, LOL)
• Played Neo. ‘Nuff said. I think we can all agree that the sequels didn’t diminish our appreciation of the original, dazzling, revolutionary Matrix
• Then…a whole decade of nothing. Sorry not sorry Something’s Gotta Give fans; that movie sucked.

I suppose that’s why he was headlining a movie made for $30 million, a pittance by today’s standards, in 2014. Yet it did well enough to get the sequel, which had a larger budget and shattered the performance of the original at the box office. Now the third installment, which cost more than the previous two combined, has already brought in four times that at the box office and so of course anything it gets on video and TV is just icing on the cake for Lionsgate. Can hardly wait to see how the fourth film does.

Perhaps Reeves’s aura will grow even more by that point. He’s got to be the most youthful 54-year-old ever. No, that’s not a typo. What’s even more jaw-dropping than his appearance is his continuing to rise up the Hollywood ranks.

Look at his contemporaries. Johnny Depp hasn’t been a box office draw in a half-decade. Brad Pitt just told GQ he’s aging out of acting. This is hardly unique to their generation – at Reeves’s current age Robert Redford had his last hit starring vehicle (Indecent Proposal) and Harrison Ford had his second-to-last (Air Force One, followed in just a few years by What Lies Beneath).

Yet Reeves only seems to get bigger. It went viral on social media recently how, when he puts his arms around female fans who want photographs with him, he doesn’t touch them with his hands. Apparently that makes him a hero in our #MeToo era.

It’s certainly not just being a gentleman off-screen that makes him popular though. On screen he recently became the toast of the town for his performance as himself in the streaming movie Always Be My Maybe, which I’m actually going to review soon for an unrelated reason.

This post is about the John Wick movies though. They’re great. Very great. I’d recommend watching them all and joining me in line for the fourth one in a couple of years.

Questions? Agreements? Disagreements? Feel free to comment.

Bottom Line: Impressive, Keanu and company.

*When I hear his name the first thing I think of is how often I’ve been told I look like him. The second is how, when I watched Kung Fu Panda with my friend Christian, he commented on the scene where Po pulled up his shorts: “I could totally see Jack Black doing that.” I said that oftentimes animated characters are drawn to imitate the actors and thus by the same token, “Maybe Jack Black and Ian McShane were really fighting and Jack Black really sat on Ian McShane’s face.” Christian laughed imagining Ian McShane complaining, “This wasn’t in my contract.”