BEFORE: I'll get back to Bigfoot-related matters tomorrow, but first I have to find an important film to mark the halfway point of the year - 150 down, 150 to go, and so far the chain remains unbroken. The weakest link is probably the one where Adam Goldberg carried over to "Before Sunrise" by playing a guy who was sleeping on a train, seen for a few seconds and without saying a line of dialogue, but that STILL COUNTS. From "Game Night" on January 1 to here, a massive feat of linking organization, and still I've got a long way to go. The next 150 films are all planned, though there's a little bit of wiggle room. I COULD, for example, go out tomorrow and see "John Wick 3" in a theater, but it's not high-priority for me. I waited two years to get to "Chapter 2", it was released in 2017 and I must have recorded it off cable some time last year. I've got bigger fish to fry, like reducing my Netflix watchlist and then trying to sneak in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" before that disappears from cinemas like "Hellboy" did.
Anyway, it's the weekend and I'm not going to take the subway into Manhattan just to see "John Wick 3", not with the L train running the way it is. (I'm just thankful it's still running at all...). Plus if I added in "John Wick 3" then I'd have to drop something else from the plan, and I'm not ready to do that yet, but that time may come if I start adding more documentaries.
Common carries over from "Smallfoot" for his fourth appearance in a row.
THE PLOT: After returning to the criminal underworld to repay a debt, John Wick discovers that a large bounty has been put on his life.
AFTER: I'm not really sure what kind of life lessons I'm supposed to get from the "John Wick" movies. This is a character that seems to have originated from that line in "Godfather III" about how "every time I think I'm out, they pull me BACK IN". Wick's been trying to retire from the hit-man game for two movies now, and every time he tries to settle his accounts and move on, something happens and he has to un-retire. Somebody kills his wife, or his dog, or slashes the tires on his car, and he suddenly realizes that he's got to dig up his guns, take the dark suit out of the closet, and get back to killing. And then in the course of pulling off that "one last job", he'll kill the wrong person (easy to do when you kill like 100 low-level henchmen in each scene) or break some rule, and that means another debt owed to somebody else.
I don't know, maybe there's something in here for the everyday working-man, I mean, you get up, you get dressed and you go do your job, whether it's baking bread or driving a truck or writing a newspaper column, and even if you have a good day and feel like you did everything you were supposed to and didn't screw anything up, what's your reward? You get to wake up the next day and do it all over again. Maybe that's the essence of John Wick, this is just his JOB and what's he going to do if he retires? Just sit around and watch the news, maybe get out and mow the lawn if the weather holds out? That's a boring character for a movie, when he could be involved in one of those cool-ass fights where three guys are coming at him at once, and he grabs one guy's gun-hand to shoot the other two.
Plus, being part of the assassin guild gets him all kinds of cool perks, like access to a professional tailor that makes him a custom Italian suit that also has Kevlar in between the layers. Or getting to visit the "sommelier" who doesn't deal in wine tastings at all but instead offers vintage or artisanal hand-crafted weaponry, for the busy assassin who doesn't want to spend a lot of time reloading. The planning expert who gives him a heads-up on the workings of the Italian catacombs, so he can pop up in his target's bathroom like a ghost. Pretty cool stuff, I mean, James Bond has his "Q" but Wick has these guys, and that's somehow cooler.
But the downside is that the assassin's guild's tech can also be used against him, like when the bounty goes out on John Wick's head, the hitmen can all be reached by cell phone now, like some twisted version of the AMBER alert, and suddenly the streets of New York are filled with hitmen, or people that you thought were newspaper vendors, street musicians, or just random people eating at a sushi bar. They're all hitmen, and New Yorkers are apparently so blasé that they just put their heads down and keep walking when they see two people shooting at each other, or try to look the other way when two hitmen on the PATH train are involved in a knife-fight. Yeah, that seems about right.
There are also RULES to the assassin game - like the marker that Santino uses to get Wick back in the game. Wick apparently gave him the "deus ex machina" blood-print oath for some now-unnamed reason, so he has to go back in, even if he doesn't want to. His life is forfeit if he doesn't, and he can't refuse, he can't kill the man with the marker, he can't buy his way out of it. Not until he does the hit that Santino wants him to do, and then, all bets are off. Santino knows the rules, too and as soon as the job is done, he puts the bounty out on Wick - it's hard to say if this is just "tying up loose ends" or just a really big dick move. I'm going with the latter.
But as I said, Wick can't seem to make a play without pissing off at least two more people or incurring a new debt, so this perfectly sets up "John Wick 3", where once again it's Wick on the run against the whole guild, I'm guessing. It's too bad I can't go see that movie - we're having some work done around the house this weekend, big plumbing leak in the kitchen and we figure as long as the guy's here, he can fix the two toilets that won't stop running and also try to get my wedding ring back from under the basement sink, it fell down there last year while I was shaving. So I can't do it, I've got to move on to other movies anyway, and I'll have to catch "John Wick 3" on cable next year. Sorry.
Today's NITPICK POINT concerns playing very fast and loose with Manhattan geography - like how John Wick enters a building in downtown Manhattan, but when he goes upstairs, he's in a roof garden surrounded by St. Patrick's Cathedral and Midtown skyscrapers. Nice trick. Or how he walks to Manhattan from New Jersey, only he does it via the Manhattan Bridge, which is on the other side of the island and therefore he doesn't come from Jersey, but from Brooklyn. Umm, maybe he took the long walking tour of Staten Island first? But the worst is probably entering a museum somewhere in NYC for a gunfight among the exhibits that are in an Italian museum. I realize that the film's scenes need to take place in the best visual locations, but this stretches the imagination a bit too much.
Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "The Gift"), Riccardo Scamarcio (last seen in "Burnt"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Ruby Rose (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Claudia Gerini (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "Don't Say a Word"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Mule"), Tobias Segal, John Leguizamo (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Bridget Moynahan (last seen in "John Wick"), Thomas Sadoski (last seen in "Wild"), Erik Frandsen, David Patrick Kelly (last seen in "The Warriors"), Perry Yung, Franco Nero (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Youma Diakite, Peter Serafinowicz (last seen in "Going in Style"), Peter Stormare (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Wass Stevens (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Luca Mosca.
RATING: 6 out of 10 boxes of gold coins
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