Keanu Reeves reminds me of Gregory Peck, another handsome movie star of limited acting range who succeeded by being eminently likable. Just as Peck was miscast as the demonic Captain Ahab of John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Reeves struggled to play the villainous Don John in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) -- something about both performers seems to draw a sympathetic response from the audience. That something is certainly needed in John Wick, with Reeves playing a remorseless hit man, though the actor is so innately likable that the filmmakers didn't really need to kill Wick's puppy to elicit audience sympathy. Shoot-'em-up thrillers are so common these days that adding another franchise to the action genre seems like overkill. But what makes John Wick work is screenwriter Derek Kolstad's ability to craft a believable alternate world in which the character can seem plausible. Director Chad Stahelski (and his co-director David Leitch, who was denied that credit by the Directors Guild) manage to create an ambience that evokes both French gangster movies and Hong Kong martial arts films -- Jean-Pierre Melville meets Tsui Hark -- while retaining a peculiarly American love of artillery and automobiles.
