The Gaming Den

Posted: **Sun Oct 26, 2014 5:25 pm**

I don't think I need to clarify that much. I'd heard some good buzz about this movie. People threw around "Best Keanu Reeves movie since The Matrix." Here's the long and a short of it though:

This is a classic 90s action movie. Except with ten times the budget, a kickass cast, and tighter script. The main plot in this movie is right along the lines of the first Transporter film, but much more slick and bloody. Keanu Reeves is amazing. The first fifteen minutes you could mistake for being a Sad Keanu meme montage, but that's just setup, and amazingly it works. It really works. I can't tell you how well it works until the metal baseball bats come out.

It's not perfect. There are a few plot holes. I don't think you're allowed to pump your own gas in New Jersey, that kind of thing. But in the grand scheme of things, you don't care. This is beautifully choreographed, wonderfully shot, excellently cast, the costume and makeup people all need complimentary oral sex, and I don't care if ten-fifteen minutes of it was a weird car commercial at one point, because this is a seriously tight movie. Ian McShane was in it and they let him play Ian McShane. They had a hard R rating and used the fuck out of it, but I don't think there was a single gratuitous titty shot - it was all blood and bullets. If there was any CGI, I didn't spot it. That's amazing. There are movies with ten times the budget that can't get away from the uncanny valley, and this film puts those to shame. There were people in the theater laughing at the funny bits because they got the beats right. I haven't seen that happen in years. This is the first movie in a decade where I want there to be a director's cut. Go see it in theaters.

Posted: **Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:14 pm**

I want to watch the movie after I found out the reason he was killing for revenge

Posted: **Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:02 pm**

I went to see it a few days ago, and it was pretty awesome indeed.

Posted: **Mon Oct 27, 2014 5:35 pm**

I assumed this thread was about how much Ancient loved the "game balance is an illusion" RPG designer John Wick and I was kind of weirded out for a minute there.

Posted: **Mon Oct 27, 2014 7:19 pm**

Man, fuck Game Designer John Wick.

Posted: **Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:41 am**

I saw this on impulse over the weekend and I was also really impressed.

Posted: **Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:49 am**

I feel the taste of crow coming on since I was openly mocking this movie to friends after I saw the trailer. I was expecting it was going to practically be a parody of the retired hitman revenge trope (genre even). I mean, burying a puppy in the trailer. Oh my god.

Posted: **Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:56 pm**

It is almost a parody. John Wick is set in a universe where every 90s action movie could have happened and high-paid professional assassins are so common that there are businesses which cater exclusively to them.

Posted: **Sat Aug 08, 2015 10:20 am**

I'm a little late to the party, but having just watched John Wick I wanted to say I didn't actually think it was super-amazing-great.

No one goes into John Wick expecting an engrossing story or well-developed world, and one thing the movie gets right is that it completely and totally understands this. You can tell the writers had a lot of fun with this script. It's like they started with a parody and then someone challenged them to take their parody, play it straight, and still make it one of the most refreshing entries into the genre written in the past ten years. So they did that, and it is. It is exactly absurd enough to make you smirk without preventing you from taking the movie seriously. That is an amazingly difficult needle to thread, and they very much do thread it. But the real reason you're watching John Wick is for the fight choreography. It's an action flick, and you're there for the action. So let's talk about that.

What they get right; the camerawork and the editing are fucking great. A lot of action flicks these days are really fucking lazy, and do their actions scenes as a bunch of quick cuts between close up shots (sometimes slightly sped up) and you can't even see what the fuck is happening except that two dudes are kinda sorta beating the shit out of eachother in some way or another and it's a waste of your god damn time. John Wick is not one of those films. It goes to great lengths to make sure you can see exactly what is happening; the shots are long and the cuts are almost always inbetween movements. The camera is there to capture the action, not to fake it.

What they get wrong; it's kind of fucking repetitive. You're going to see the exact same couple of "flip a dude around" moves over and over and over. You're also going to see more than a few "I have a gun. Let me step closer so I can shoot y- hey what are you doing let go of my arm HOW COULD THIS HAVE POSSIBLY GONE SO WRONG" moments, where visibly armed people step within arm's reach of John Wick (and immediately get tossed around) instead of fucking shooting him. And that is just fucking lazy. I found that - and eventually the repetition - pretty jarring. More jarring than John Wick buying his way into an underground nightclub filled with hitmen using a gold coin, and that was pretty god damn absurd.

Posted: **Sat Aug 08, 2015 7:32 pm**

I enjoyed it a lot. It was one of the two films I saw shortly after my mother's death last year (that and The Book of Life). The movie was wonderfully violent and cathartic for me. The whole thing is a love letter to 90s action movies and blood operas.

Posted: **Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:00 pm**

I liked a lot of the movie, but the gold coin thing was something I had a hard time wrapping my head around.

So far as I understand it, its a currency that is only used by assassins, people who want people assassinated, and people who preform services for assassins (crime scene cleanup, etc). So, how do these things cycle? Do the customers do things for the service guys to get coins from them? Because if not, how are the customers getting these coins, and how are the service providers spending them?

Posted: **Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:43 am**

They've already announced a sequel to John Wick, haven't they?

Posted: **Tue Aug 25, 2015 5:39 pm**

RobbyPants wrote:I liked a lot of the movie, but the gold coin thing was something I had a hard time wrapping my head around.

So far as I understand it, its a currency that is only used by assassins, people who want people assassinated, and people who preform services for assassins (crime scene cleanup, etc). So, how do these things cycle? Do the customers do things for the service guys to get coins from them? Because if not, how are the customers getting these coins, and how are the service providers spending them?

Neutral authorities like the Continental provide a marketplace for underworld activity, and probably also perform the role of central bank by minting those coins and by maintaining a positive balance of favors that they can call in for you if what you're looking for isn't in the bar that night. I'm certain you can also pay these guys in ordinary cash (or weapons, or cocaine, or other fungible goods), but the coins travel a lot better and they fulfill the role as shibboleth. I'm also certain they're a genuine fiat currency and worth a lot more than the $1,000 ounce of gold that they're made from.

Posted: **Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:12 pm**

When I saw the movie, I assumed they were just using Krugerrands. But it turns out they are using custom gold coins that say "ens causa sui" on them.

-Username17

Posted: **Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:11 am**

All right you got me sold on it. Watching now.

Posted: **Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:32 pm**

I have seen John Wick 2. And it is good.

Okay, so everything that they needed to o during this movie, they accomplished. The plot is by-the-numbers to the point of cliche, but you don't fucking care because it's so god damn nice to watch and everybody is super-competent at whatever they're doing. You need a recap of the first film without being especially recap-ish, and you get it; you need a new motivtion for the new movie, and you get that too. You need a bigger villain and bigger stakes and more action and a set-up for the inevitable third film, and you get all the as well. You wanted to know more about the secret underworld that runs on gold coins and has hotels for assassins AND YOU GET THAT TOO. They literally ran down the fucking checklist and it was like "yeah, we're not finishing the movie until we check off every one of these goddamn things."

But it's...fun. It's nice. It's a little more James-Bond-y, as we're expected to believe in super-bulletproof suits instead of the body armor from the first film, and at one point they're having a silenced pistol battle in a crowded walkway and literally nobody hears fucking shit that's stupid but I laughed anyway. Fucking hell, near the climax of the film you've got an homage to the mirror battle in Enter the Dragon - and that's been done before, but it's never been done well before. Convincingly. It's just really fucking fun. Even all the new assassins are fun. It's like Aces High without the boring shit.

I'm sure, on second or third or fourth times watching it, I'll pick out more details that bother me. It's maybe not quite as relaxed as the first film; it follows a couple of the same action beats but doesn't hit anything quite like the shoot-out in the club scene from the first film. But that's okay, because there's plenty of awesome moments in here, including Lawrence Fishburne hamming it the fuck up for the camera like a boss. The ending is fucking beautiful, in a "to be continued" kinda way.

It's sortof anti-Jason Bourne. Everything is stylish and flash, even the fucking hobo assassin with the silenced pistol and the tin cup. It's James Bond if James Bond was a criminal-for-hire. Like, a good James Bond film, not a shitty one.

Everybody that didn't die in the first film comes back, and they give them some expanded roles and lines. Because why the fuck not? The new dog isn't in it much, but I think that's a good thing; if it was John Wick 2: The Dog Dies Again then we'd just be in self-parody territory already, like the goddamn Hangover films. The dog survives. He's a good boy. This is a good film. I want to go see it again.

Posted: **Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:56 pm**

That's in theaters! I will watch.

Thanks AH.

Posted: **Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:54 pm**

Yo AH, did you mean Smokin' Aces in that spoiler?

Posted: **Sat Feb 11, 2017 5:23 pm**

Yeah, whatever. The one with the crazy hillbilly assassins.

Posted: **Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:15 am**

Fucking hell, near the climax of the film you've got

an homage to the mirror battle in Enter the Dragon - and that's been done before, but it's never been done well before.

I liked the one in Longest Nite (spoilerish link).

The Gaming Den

John Wick is Awesome

John Wick is Awesome