John Wick is simple yet effective. Its humanizing onset can feel superficial, but also very streamlined. There's gratuitous action peppered with efficient world-building and character drama. It's all pretty cliche (villain monologues, plot armor, deus ex machina, and cheesy developments) but the film saves itself by staying concise. Consequently, it's able to add callbacks, humor, mythological metaphors, and irony. This strengthens its antihero archetype and provides possible themes of grief, civility, respect, and escaping past sins. Plus, the acting offers range and authentic stunt work. Overall, John Wick optimizes familiar tropes, supplying enough emotion to support its thrills.
Technically, John Wick is stylish. Its polished visuals use focus, angles, composition, colors, lighting, movement, framing, and long takes. The energetic but controlled editing adds smash inserts, dissolves, dips to black, timeline jumps, intercuts, montages, cross cuts, and slo-mo. Its vivid sound utilizes split cuts, symbolism, volume, silence, emphasis, action, echoes, layers, and match cuts. The music is trendy, the production design is sleek, the digital effects are enhanced by significant stunts, and the casting of Reeves is almost meta. Ultimately, John Wick's single-mindedness makes it fairly shallow and repetitive, but also creates space for emphatic entertainment.
Writing: 6/10
Direction: 8/10
Cinematography: 9/10
Acting: 8/10
Editing: 9/10
Sound: 9/10
Score/Soundtrack: 8/10
Production Design: 7/10
Casting: 8/10
Effects: 7/10
Overall Score: 7.9/10
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