No wife, no puppy, no car, the mysterious Jack Wick ain't got no-thing left to lose

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) resides in a vast modernist manor in the Jersey woods, its décor, like Wick’s wardrobe, so uniformly titanium and ash-coloured that for long stretches we could be watching a black and white film. Wick’s home resembles a luxury tomb, which seems apt: his beloved wife has died, though she had the foresight to arrange to have an adorable puppy delivered the day of her funeral to console Wick in his grief. But, in a perverse twist of fate, that goes to hell too: the spoiled idiot son (Alfie Allen) of some Russian Mafiosi (Michael Nyqvist) eyeballs Wick’s slick ’69 Mustang at a service station and decides to break into Wick’s house, beat him up, steal his ride and kill his puppy. At this point in John Wick we still don’t know much about who Wick is, but the fact that he doesn’t call the cops after the spoiled idiot son and his cronies depart should tell us something.

Turns out Wick’s a highly regarded contract killer who managed to go straight—and a former associate of the spoiled idiot son’s mighty powerful pa. Now that Wick’s lost his wife, car and pooch he’s pretty much got nothing left to do but kill the spoiled idiot son and whoever else gets in the way. That whoever else turns into, oh, maybe a hundred hired douchebags in tailored suits who get shot, kicked, punched, stabbed, head-butted, blown up and run over in dizzyingly quick succession. John Wick is a revenge movie. It was written by Derek Kolstad and is the directorial debut of stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski (though as of time-of-writing IMDb also says it's the directorial debut of actor/stuntman David Leitch). Its violence alternates between clean-cool and messy-ugly, it contains a pleasingly minimal amount of bullshit that doesn’t need to be there, it’s neither very distinctive nor completely generic and it uses Keanu’s natural placidity fairly well. 

Keanu does Lee!

But what I like best about John Wick is the colourful way it populates its comic book crime milieu. There’s a crack team of dead guy disposal experts who show up with Windex and body bags at the drop of a corpse; there’s a posh hotel that prides itself on being a non-partisan, killing-free zone for thugs of all stripes, a sort of Mafia Switzerland in the middle of Manhattan; there’s a crowded nightclub strewn with monochromatic psychedelia that allows Stahelski to stage a small homage to Point Blank, with Reeves casually assuming the Lee Marvin poses; there are sundry bad-asses (one of whom is played by Willem Dafoe) who might save Wick’s life or snuff it out depending on the number of zeroes in the commission. The film’s conceits are all wildly over-the-top but they’re mostly played out with minimal fuss, almost no scenery chewing, some gallows humour, and a nice little cameo from Ian McShane.  

                  

Die, another Day

A famous American once said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, but fear itself can be pretty goddamned scary. Apparently when Americans feels fear they instinctively resort to blowing shit up, no matter how unbelievably stupid such actions may be. In the new, longer, dumber and duller version of The Day the Earth Stood Still poor old Klaatu the alien gets pumped with lead before he can even get a word out. His people have studied long to understand our earthly ways, but I guess no one ever told them it was dangerous to be in Central Park at night.

Klaatu arrives in a big misty sphere to serve mankind its eviction notice. We’ve abused this planet long enough it seems, and interplanetary real estate’s at a premium, so out we go in a plague of metallic locusts that can chomp through baseball stadiums without stopping for a breather. Unless of course, like Ebenezer Scrooge, we can convince our executioner of our capacity for change.

After Klaatu busts out of his placenta suit and absconds, rather implausibly, from the military facility where he’s being prodded, he spends a little time on our company. Disguised as Keanu Reeves in a suit—is this really the most inconspicuous shape he could think to assume?—he liaisons with astrophysicist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). She gives him a lift to some state park where more alien spheres lay waiting to get their Armageddon on. From there it’s off to the home of a Nobel-prize winning biologist (John Cleese) where Klaatu hears Bach. It’s beautiful, he says with genuine awe. Somebody take this guy to a record store! We could speed things along with some Procol Harum.

If the aliens really do come and threaten to kill us all it would certainly not be advisable to show them this movie. Klaatu can resuscitate the dead, make helicopters smash into each other, create ear-piercing noises and get tuna sandwiches out of the vending machines for free—he’s not going to be impressed by these lame special effects, the pointless artificial camera swoops around cars and poorly matched green-screening. He might have a soft spot for kids, granted, but Helen’s stepson is so relentlessly annoying that such a gambit seems doomed to backfire. Helen herself is a total fox, but Klaatu’s libido has apparently been Zenned into submission. So yeah, it’s pretty much hopeless.

The new Day is just as didactic as the old one while lacking all of its fun. Yet director Scott Derrickson seems uninterested in fun anyway. His apocalypse is boring, the overwhelming loss flatly abstract, the menace bland, the story needlessly padded. The original film’s spectral spookiness has been traded in for murky imagery and boilerplate design. Reeves doesn’t help much either. The single thing he needs to do here is change his mind, yet he can’t quite manage it. If they needed a supernaturally handsome, seemingly enlightened but nonetheless otherly-looking famous person to play Klaatu couldn’t they have got Richard Gere? How about David Byrne? Better yet, why not Al Gore? Give him a little software, set him up in Times Square and Bob’s your uncle.