John Wick

There are so many elegant little touches in John Wick that it would be tempting to dismiss them as out of place in an intensely violent revenge picture. There’s a scene in a cemetery early in the film, and the tombstones in the foreground are thrown into relief by the skyscrapers of New York in the background, so that the buildings really just look like taller tombstones. Yes, one can read a lot of symbolism into this shot, but it’s better, perhaps, to think of it as simply an artful shot, conceived by a director (Chad Stahelski) and a cinematographer (Jonathan Sela) who love movies and love what they can suggest visually in movies. This isn’t an attempt to be showy or pompous, it’s just exuberant filmmaking.

It’s precisely that exuberant filmmaking that our popular genres have been missing for so long. The skillful ways that Stahelski elevates the visual elements of John Wick set it apart from the rest of its ilk, and that’s a wonderful, refreshing surprise. It’s the only action movie in recent memory that actually cares about being a movie. (Except Skyfall. And maybe a few others.) The violence is so exciting, so well-staged and suspenseful, that you might forget just how brutal it would be in real life. (I did feel overwhelmed at times, but I’m not an aficionado of this genre per se.) Viewers who have been made to sit through so much garden variety action crap may find their appetites wetted for a renewed standard of quality, one that they had forgotten after years of being mediocritied to death. (No, that’s not a real word.)

This is a perversely beautiful movie, which is just the right kind of beautiful for a “mindless” action thriller. Even the performance of Keanu Reeves—who is nothing if not a spotty actor—adds to the film’s panache. He doesn’t have a lot of speaking lines, and Stahelski uses this to his advantage, pointing up Reeves’s look: He’s a lean, fit, poised killing machine, and if anyone imagined that at fifty Reeves was less capable of ass-kicking, John Wick offers ample proof to the contrary. Actually, Keanu Reeves is one of those actors whose badness somehow translates into goodness.

When Reeves shouted “I am an FBI agent!” in Point Break, I laughed hysterically. Then I recorded the sound clip with my phone and made it one of my ring tones. I don’t suppose it will sound sincere, but I like Reeves’ acting as it is. He never seems insincere, but he often struggles to sound believable as an actor. But you admire him for trying, and it’s hard not to be impressed with his physical presence on the screen. Even now he can grab an audience in a way that seemingly more magnetic stars like Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio cannot. He’s more believable as an everyman than Depp, and more in touch with his physicality than DiCaprio.

The first half of John Wick has a murky atmosphere that suits the mood of the title character, who’s grieving the death of his wife and completely alone. But then something happens that ignites Wick’s sense of vengeance, and he goes after a group of Russian mobsters with the full force of his hatred and his considerable skills as a professional killer, one whose services the mob frequented before he retired. In one scene, a group of masked men working for the Russian mobsters raids Wick’s house, but he takes them on with enjoyable ease and an impressive degree of cold skill and smarts.

We’re usually treated to fight scenes that are virtually incomprehensible because of the rapid camera movement and editing. John Wick shows off its star’s abilities and its filmmakers’ too—letting us see fighting that is masterfully staged and actually, you know, visible. The suspense from those scenes is organic, never forced by flashy editing. In a later sequence—a big showdown at a nightclub all glossed out in neon reds, greens and pinks, Stahelski is at the peak of his powers: the violence hits an all-time high in its indefensibleness, and the visual beauty—all the colors and the exciting ways that the actors inhabit their bodies and the choreography of their brawling—combine into a riveting display of sheer vainglorious mayhem. After a while you begin to feel exhausted by the intensity of it, but never numb, and as the film is mercilessly short at 98 minutes, you’re not there long enough to resent the movie for its carnage. And the movie is still very tame if you compare it to something like a Tarantino film. It’s violent but not excessively gory. John Wick is intense, funny, well-mounted kung fu, only with machine guns.

With Michael Nyqvist Alfie Allen, Willem Defoe, Dean Winters (hilarious as the Russian mobster’s non-fighting right-hand-man), Adrianne Palicki, Bridget Moynahan, John Leguizamo, and Ian McShane. Written by Derek Kolstad.

Point Break

In Point Break (1991), directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), Keanu Reeves, who is incapable of not sounding like a surfer, plays a fresh-faced young FBI agent who's forced to go undercover as a surfer, even though it's like totally out of his comfort zone. That premise is about as believable as his performance. Keanu squares off with Patrick Swayze, the charismatic, Manson-lite leader of a foursome of surfing buddies who spend their free time robbing banks. They're known to the FBI only as the Ex-Presidents, because when they rob banks they wear Halloween masks that bear the resemblances of Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and LBJ.

It is my understanding that Point Break is something of an iconic film for action movie buffs. Who can forget the scene in Hot Fuzz when Nick Frost--imitating Keanu--can't shoot his enemy, and instead points his gun in the air and fires repeatedly while shouting, "NOOOOO!"? And yet, Point Break isn't particularly interesting or thrilling (except for a few scenes, including a misfired shootout at a meth house that is tensely exciting). It manages to be both a gritty cops-and-robbers action flick and a meditation on surfing, trying to capture the philosophical majesty of catching a wave. But it never quite gels.

The film hinges on Swayze's pitch: he's fighting the system by living life his own way, riding the waves rather than trying to climb a corporate ladder somewhere. I appreciated his disdain for that whole corporate system lifestyle. I'm not a big fan of it either. And I also appreciated that Patrick Swayze doesn't ever "try" too hard. He just does his thing, and his performance feels easy and natural compared to poor Keanu, who, try as he might, can't seem to conjure up any power behind his screams and shouts. He's incredibly lucky that he's good-looking and likable. And, as I wrote about in my Dracula review, he's got enough capable actors around him to pick up the slack.

Gary Busey, playing Keanu's seasoned partner, seems to have played this part before. His role isn't particularly interesting, but he manages to breathe some crusty, tough-as-nails life into it. And Lori Petty, as the love interest, has a certain vulnerability to her. She's been hurt but she's wizened up and she's a fighter. Kathryn Bigelow is a capable director--Point Break is well-made for what it is--but she fails to lift the movie out of its badness. It's a collection of ideas patched together from other action films: a slick, carefully put together piece of product. But she finds little ways to stir up some embers when she can. There's a certain haunting quality to the film that you don't generally get in an action piece, and it reminded me of her vampire movie, Near Dark, which was equally haunting. And there's that lingering theme of obsession which seems to be present in most of her films: Keanu becomes obsessed with tracking his bank-robbing foe, and Swayze is obsessed with catching the perfect wave. (There's even a little something-something going on between them, if you ask me.)

With John C. McGinley, who overacts so we'll hate him and laugh when Busey cold cuts him to the ground; James LeGros, and John Philbin. Written by W. Peter Iliff. 123 min. ★★

Bram Stoker's Dracula

In 1897, Dracula was published and experienced moderate success. Its author, the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, never knew how enduring his novel would become. When German filmmaker F.W. Murnau filmed Nosferatu in 1922, Stoker's widow came after Murnau for violating the copyright she held over Dracula. Florence Stoker wasn't able to stop the movies from getting at her late husband's most interesting and most sustained novel, but she did receive some remuneration from Universal when they made Dracula in 1931. And yet, if Dracula hadn't been made all the more popular on the stage and then on screen in these two afore-mentioned films, we likely wouldn't be talking about it today.

First of all there was a much more popular horror novel released in 1897: Richard Marsh's The Beetle, about a shape-shifting bug terrorizing London in much the same fashion as Count Dracula. The Beetle was forgotten (no movies have been made of it to my knowledge) and even though it has recently experienced a sort of literary resurrection among critics, it effectively switched places with Dracula after Stoker's novel was adapted to the big screen. Second, there was another vampire novel from 1897 called The Blood of the Vampire, by the prolific Florence Marryat. Marryat's vampire, Harriet Brandt, was a psychic vampire: she drained the life out of people without resorting to fangs and bloodsucking. And Harriet wasn't affected by sunlight or crosses or holy water. But like Dracula, she was cursed. (Harriet was mixed: her father a white scientist with an interest in vivisection and her mother a black slave and voodoo priestess from the island of Barbados.) I have often wondered what vampire movies would have been like if Marryat's had been the lasting work and not Stoker's. Would we have been stuck with Twilight either way?

Fast forward to 1992 and the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola (The Godafther, Apocalypse Now). Watching it for the third or fourth time, I am struck by the visual splendor and ecstasy of Coppola's version. He and screenwriter James V. Hart point up the erotic overtones in the novel. The film's visual composition has a sense of passion that makes this a supremely interesting movie to watch. It's a breathtaking, thrilling, visceral movie visually speaking: the black silhouettes against an angry orange sky during the scenes of the Crusades that initiate our understanding of Dracula the warrior (although the book doesn't really touch on this much); the howling wolves in the distance as Jonathan Harker changes carriages en route to Count Dracula's foreboding Castle deep in the Carpathian mountains of primitive Eastern Europe; the grey, grim yet Dickensian-looking skyline of 1890s London; the stark reds and greens that permeate the entire film, from the backdrops to the costumes to the blood and the flowers.

As for the plotting, Dracula unfolds in a relatively straightforward and faithful way, except for the beginning, which is an attempt to link the fictional Dracula to his alleged historical persona, Vlad the Impaler. Even when the film seems a bit poky, there is the beauty, the sheer intensity, the sensationalism, as well as the passionate music score of composer Wojciech Kilar. Coppola's ability to turn up the suspense and the terror is quite limber and surprising, and there's a sick, amusing sense of humor in the movie too. Even though this rarely if ever turns campy, it's an unashamed celebration of the excess of Gothic sensibilities. Gothic novels, going back to 1764's The Castle of Otranto, have always fixated on the passion and darkness that rattled and sometimes derailed modernity's reliance on things like science and rationalism. That is the chief allure of a story like Dracula: it's simply genius to have a vampire leave the superstitious culture of Eastern Europe and head to the mecca of European progress and imperialism: London. Nobody believes in vampires there--and even God has become a relic, removed very much from the common life of the modern world--so Dracula is free to feast on the blood of unsuspecting British ladies Mina (Winona Ryder) and Lucy (Sadie Frost, who really ratchets up Lucy's burgeoning sex drive) with hardly anyone to suspect his existence.

Gary Oldman plays the Count, and he imbues him with a sense of loss and emotional torment without sacrificing the qualities that make Dracula a dangerous and frightening enemy of pure British sensibilities. Anthony Hopkins--presumably trying to balance the scales after playing such a memorably devious character as Hannibal Lecter--has a fun time playing Dr. Van Helsing, the eccentric metaphysician and philosopher who figures out what's terrorizing the English ladies; Keanu Reeves is a bit of an embarrassment as Jonathan Harker, especially since his British accent fails to hide that stoner-surfer tone in his voice. But Reeves is handsome and works as a sort of 90s Joe Dallesandro, as though Coppola were nodding a little to Andy Warhol's 1973 Dracula movie. Reeves is also fairly convincing whenever he's being defiled by Dracula's three lascivious vampire wives (one of whom is played by Monica Bellucci), who keep him a prisoner in Transylvania while the Count travels to London. Harker is such a dull, passive character that having a not-so-great actor portray him isn't such a bad idea. You don't worry that he will overshadow Anthony Hopkins or Gary Oldman, and he balances out their intensity with his banality. (I'm really not trying to insult Keanu Reeves. If you're reading this Keanu, I just want to thank you for The Night Before, a forgotten 80s teen classic.)

With Richard E. Grant as Dr. Seward, Cary Elwes as Athur, Billy Campbell as Quincy Morris, Tom Waits as Renfield, and Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula's vampire wives. 128 min. ★★★