Thinking Out Loud

Tag: Common

  • Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2

    Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2

    Rating: 2 out of 5.

    I’m kicking myself for wasting a rare Sunday movie theater outing on stunt choreographer-turned director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 2. I can’t deny the high craft and artistry that puts it near the top of its genre, but I’m just too sick and tired of gun culture as escapist entertainment.

    Give me a kung fu movie any day, where the fighting is beautiful and balletic. I just can’t turn off my brain and enjoy brutal MMA and/or firearm combat, where the aim is to maim or murder. Granted, maybe my mood was negatively influenced by the psychopaths in the theater that applauded every time somebody our hero Johnny W. put a bullet through a brain or stabbed some guy in the groin.

    OK, fine, I have to admit that Keanu Reeves does execute one incredible gun-related trick that impressed even this pacifist: he one-handedly flips his hand around the back of a pistol, opens & closes the chamber, and flips his hand back to the grip. That was awesome.

    Searching for other positive comments to make: Ian McShane is, as usual, delicious. He’s in Shakespeare while everyone else is just in some dumb movie. I also always like Common (see also Hell on Wheels and Selma), and the reunion of Keanu and with his Matrix costar Laurence Fishburne is entertainingly hammy.

  • Every Day is Exactly the Same for James McAvoy in Wanted

    Every Day is Exactly the Same for James McAvoy in Wanted

    The Nine Inch Nails song “Every Day is Exactly the Same” is so thematically perfect for the early part of Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted, that it seems to have been composed especially.

    But Wanted is weighed down by an overly extensive backstory that goes back thousands of years, and an approach to violent spectacle that borders on the sadistic. It’s hard not to sense a trend, as I’ve had the same complaints about a couple other movies I happened to see recently: Hancock, Speed Racer, and Southland Tales.

    Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy play assassins with superhuman abilities, directly tied to the action choreography and special effects: the power to “throw” bullets and slow down their perception of time in order to move superhumanly fast. All of this is framed in close and medium shots, a bad choice for an action film that ought to display its stunts and derring-do in full. It’s more visually disorientating than even the hyperkinetic Speed Racer, but the slow-mo sequences paradoxically render the proceedings rather boring — even when something that ought to be impressive is happening, a bullet sliced in twain by sword.

    James McAvoy, Common, and Angelina Jolie in Wanted
    James McAvoy, Common, and Angelina Jolie at the country fair

    It’s difficult to feel sympathy for a protagonist who, when causing a literal train wreck, resumes his murderous mission instead of aiding the countless innocent bystanders he has turned into collateral damage. In the end, Wesley smugly asks, “What the fuck have you done lately?” So, becoming a superhuman assassin has granted Wesley self-actualization: he’s free of his botched relationship and dead-end job, he’s physically fit, and he shoots people in the head for a living.

    So, Wanted flirts with the nihilistic themes of David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, but without the irony. What many surface-level admirers of Fight Club seem to forget is that while it initially seems to celebrate its unnamed protagonist’s decisive break from the supposedly stifling bounds of society, his self-help credo attracts the wrong kind of followers and spins out of control to its ultimate logical end: anarchy.