I can’t get enough of John Wick. As soon as one of the films in the series showed up on a streaming platform (typically HBO Max), it became a default choice for me and my partner Judith, who adores them as much as I do. But it wasn’t until we were both crushed by the flu and decided to go to bed early and stay there till the next day that I figured out why this particular set of movies was so enchanting. All four were available, so Judith suggested we watch them all in order—a nine-hour commitment, not including breaks.
Seeing all four back-to-back showed me that star Keanu Reeves, director Chad Stahelski and the writers (mainly Derek Kolstad, who named the character after his maternal grandfather) deftly avoided many of the traps that befall sequels to hit action movies. One thing that helped is the compact time frame. The entire story takes place in about two weeks. The films feel continuous and maintain their momentum.
Only one other element is more important.
It’s not the “gun fu” fight scenes, which had the shock of the new in the original movie, and grew so elaborate as the franchise progressed that it felt like a lethal cousin of modern dance. It’s not the chases, although there are plenty, and they’re superb (my favorite is the chase around the Arc de Triomphe in the fourth film). It isn’t the neo-noir samurai gunslinger aesthetic. It’s not the world-building, which vividly catalogs the society of criminals Wick inhabits while leaving crucial information to the imagination (such as the task that John performed to earn his freedom).
No, what makes the John Wick series special is its heart. The movies add up to an epic modern gothic love story in which one of the lovers is dead.
The main characters are the retired hitman John and his late wife Helen, the woman he retired for. Helen is past-tense to the rest of the world but eternally present-tense for John. He regularly reinforces his feelings for her—freshens them up, you could say—through video, memories, fantasies, and dreams.
Some would describe this behavior as compulsive, perhaps a manifestation of “complicated grief” or “persistent complex bereavement disorder.” But that’s only because nine years separate the first and final installments. Moviegoers who saw each film independent of the others might understandably think, upon cueing up the final chapter, “This guy sure is hung up on his wife—it’s been nine years!” But in actuality, as noted earlier, it’s a short window. Part 2 starts right after the conclusion of Part 1 and ends with Wick killing an adversary on the hallowed ground of The Continental, being declared “excommunicado,” and having a bounty placed on his head. Part 3 starts one hour later, after the end of the “grace period” John was given, and follows him around the world until he’s finally “killed off” in a staged event; and Part 4 is set roughly six months after that.
But no matter how you experience the movies, the energy released by John’s inconsolable suffering flows through them all. It even flows through scenes he isn’t in, because John’s thresher-like movement through the ranks of professional assassins is always a central topic of conversation, and everyone knows what drives it: loss, mourning, and chivalrous impulse once directed at his beloved wife that now has no object, and must instead be focused on needful souls he encounters as he travels.
Reeves’ beautiful, haunted face bypasses contemporary, therapy-based notions of grief management. It connects instead to traditions of certain 18th and 19th-century English and American poems which depict grief not as a force that one must overcome, move past, or accept and incorporate into daily life, but as a rock that true romantics dash themselves against, again and again, until the rock breaks or they do.
Call it heroic despair, after the phrase defined by the 17th-century philosopher Julius Bahnsen. You know heroic despair when you see it. It powers the feats of heroes whose own dreams have been crushed but risk their own lives for others or complete a mission out of a sense of duty, often perishing in the process. (This is exactly what John does, in hopes of putting the broken pieces of the underworld back together.) Edgar Allan Poe’s elegies to his wife Virginia, who died at 24, exhibit a type of heroic despair that’s at risk of mutating into self-annihilation. These include “The Raven,” which we all know well; and Annabel Lee, whose narrator concludes that no force is strong enough to separate their souls and lies down beside his beloved in her tomb by the sea. (John’s reward is burial beside his wife, though in a regular graveyard rather than a tomb by the sea.)
The series also bears imprints of death- and loss-focused poems by John Keats (whose narrator in “Ode to a Nightingale” admits that “for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death”); John Donne, who reminded us for whom the bell tolls; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote 44 sonnets to her poet husband Robert, and whose short poem “Grief” might as well have been directed at John, who speaks 380 words across four films:: “Deep-hearted man, express / Grief for thy dead in silence like to death.”
The series is filled with mythological allusions, some purposeful, others incidental. The main character is a human monster who once killed other human monsters, turns good for love’s sake, loses his mate, and keeps having to travel back into a figurative Hell (the small-u underworld of criminals, run by the High Table) that he fought so hard to escape.
One of the strongest affinities is with the myth of Orpheus. A musician who was once a crewman on Jason’s boat The Argonaut, Orpheus descends to hell to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice, who fell into a viper pit while trying to escape a satyr. John doesn’t go to those extremes—if he had, the result might have echoed 2005’s “Constantine,” in which Reeves’ title character goes to Hell to save a psychic (Rachel Weisz) whose death is initially described as a suicide, but is revealed to be a sacrifice she made to prevent Lucifer’s son Mammon from ruling the world. John is trying to rescue not Helen herself, but the memory of Helen, from the oblivion of a world that moves constantly forward, forgetting all that came before. He does this by acting as archivist, caretaker, and storage unit for the memory of Helen. This resonates with another Reeves film, the 1995 dystopian sci-fi thriller “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which he plays a courier who stores confidential data in the part of his brain that once held his childhood memories.
The quest to preserve the memory of Helen, even as a meager set of disconnected moments, is not selfless. John gets something important out of it: fleeting moments of bliss. The only thing keeping him from turning one of his many fearsome weapons on himself is the fact that his years with Helen were so nourishing that even fragmented memories of their relationship make a violent life on the run a more attractive prospect than death, by his own hands or those of his would-be killers.
The saga begins with a story about a former hitman who found a love so great that it inspired him to start a new life, only to lose his beloved to cancer, and then seeks revenge against gangsters who stole his car and killed the puppy that was his wife’s parting gift. It’s understandable that it sometimes is summed up as a revenge saga, like “Kill Bill” or Sergio Leone’s Westerns. But the series is ultimately not about revenge at all—at least, not after the first one. And even there, you could make a case that revenge is merely the springboard that jumps us into the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is love. Sad, beautiful, never-ending love. The kind you rarely see depicted in English-language cinema (though it’s alive throughout Asia) but that fueled old poets who, despite different styles and goals, shared the belief that the agony of lost love was not a state to go into gently, but to rage against.
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