The <em>John Wick</em> Movies Have Quietly Become Our Greatest Comedy Franchise
A viral tweet about the new John Wick spinoff Ballerina caught my eye recently. It read:
BALLERINA: There's subtext, there's text, & then there's Ian McShane telling Ana de Armas: “Needing to know is what got us banished from the garden of Eden … are you prepared to be cast out again, (dramatic pause) Eve?”
This line, with all its overwrought drama, is in fact in the trailer for Ballerina . And it is, as the Twitterer fairly notes, not at all subtle. The John Wick films are not usually thought of as works of subtextual genius. There are indeed many moments in these films that use metaphor like a blunt object. At the beginning of Chapter 3 , John Wick not only reminds us that he's the boogeyman-esque “Baba Yaga” by checking out a book of Russian folk tales, he then uses that book to literally hit his enemy over the head. (He eventually positions the large hardcover over a table in order to slam the man over it and snap his neck, before thoughtfully returning the volume to the stacks.) But I would like to argue that there is something subtle, or subtle-ish, going on in John Wick . The subtext, right from the first film, but more so with each passing installment, is that all of what you're seeing is nonsense, and therefore hilarious.
I recently rewatched them all, and specifically because they make me laugh. If I were feeling provocative, I might even go so far as to argue that they are our greatest ongoing comedy franchise (not that there's a lot of competition). The premise itself is funny: What if an elite hit man were hell-bent on seeking revenge for someone killing his … dog?
Does this get missed by people watching the movies? I think it does, by enough people to make it worth saying. I have seen John Wick films in the cinema and found myself one of very few audience members laughing. A lot of action movies are funny in what I would think of as an unintentional way: when the weight of the seriousness of the tone becomes too heavy for a film to sustain and we start to chuckle. But the John Wick films are meant to be funny. Everybody involved in making a John Wick film knows this. No filmmaker has the villain actually do that slow-clapping thing to show he is one step ahead of the protagonist, as Zero (Mark Dacascos) does in Chapter 3 , without knowing it is by now one of the most tired tropes of the genre and knowing that it's therefore amusing to include.
And nobody knows it more so than Keanu Reeves himself. Reeves is now best known as an action star, but his breakthrough was in comedy , and he was heavily involved in fine-tuning each of these films to a most excellent degree: cutting dialogue, spitballing ideas for scenes with the director. He knew what he was doing. The way Reeves delivers every one of his sparse lines, 25 percent slower than anyone would actually speak, is a wink to the audience. The whole franchise is an extended version of the scene in The Blues Brothers where you think, They can't possibly be going to crash another cop car , and yet they do. And then 12 more. It is excessive and stupid and laden with pregnant pauses in heavy-handed dialogue because the shoot-'em-up as a genre is inherently ludicrous.
But the John Wick films are not parodies, strictly. And thank God. Unlike, say, the Deadpool movies, the humor of the John Wick films is grounded in the fact that it is played overwhelmingly straight. There is nothing so crass as a fourth-wall break, no mugging for the audience, none of that embarrassing Marvel movie “Uh, so that just happened.” Never does some unsuspecting tourist, in the Big Apple to see Hamilton , try to check in to the Continental. The genius of John Wick ’s comedy is that it is plausibly deniable. There are some more obvious gags here and there, enough to hint to the audience that you're not supposed to be taking any of it seriously. The one that stands out in my memory is Zero choosing to sit right next to John Wick on one of the Continental's sofas, and Wick gets up and moves to another seat. But the best bits in John Wick aren't the ones overtly played for yuks.
Take, for instance, most of the franchise's key fight scenes. In John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (even that title!), Wick finds himself in a room full of glass cabinets. We know that when there is glass in a John Wick film, that glass is getting smashed. But the first time an assassin throws Wick into some of the glass, he bounces off it. Only then does the carnage begin, as Wick tumbles through one, two, three, four, five glass cabinets in a row. Or the infamous staircase scene in the fourth film, when Wick battles his way up the hundreds of steps that lead up to Sacré-Coeur in Paris, only to be kicked back down every single one of them, rolling for an absurdly, deliciously long time . There is an homage to Buster Keaton in every film , and for good reason. The primary reference point for these scenes isn't straight action per se; it's slapstick, and slapstick carried out with a stone face . In Ballerina , the allusions only multiply: In one scene, the aforementioned Eve mercilessly bludgeons another character with a remote control, causing the TV behind her to flip between Keaton, the Three Stooges, and a fight scene from not Hong Kong but Airplane!
The fact that they're ultimately comedies is what allows John Wick films to be such great action films. They can go to the extremes of scenarios that other films might not, for fear of becoming too over the top. There is no such thing as over the top in John Wick . If they often seem one sequel away from John Wick on Ice! , well, there's Eve in Ballerina , sliding around a miniature rink, slicing up her opponents with her skates. Even when they are doing expositional world building to ground all the nonsense in some kind of reality, it's always very thinly drawn. There's a comedy there too. How does the High Table actually work? What is the precise relationship between an Adjudicator, a Harbinger, a Concierge, and a Manager? They know it doesn't matter. What matters is that you are never more than 20 minutes away from someone else saying, “No business can be conducted on Continental grounds.” That Ian McShane is going to be nursing a martini while he delivers some lines in Latin. That a dog is gonna be there, and it might just bite someone in the crotch . That those inexplicably rockabilly switchboard operators are going to have yet another cigarette. That a busker is going to pull a concealed revolver out of the body of their violin. What matters is that John Wick is going to kill a dozen people in 15 seconds and go, “Yeah.”
