This year, star/cowriter Sean Penn and director Pierre Morel fired some disappointing blanks with The Gunman. Penn was at his most interesting as an actor when he played the disturbed and compulsive Samuel Bicke, a kind of parallel to Arthur Bremer (see also Travis Bickle), in The Assassination Of Richard Nixon. But The Gunman sought to marry an action-movie plot about a onetime mercenary haunted by an assassination he committed in Central Africa with Penn's social conscience, as the character is also part of an initiative to bring clean water to the region. As a result it left no one happy, with the gunman apparently assuaging his stricken conscience by killing even more people and putting Penn in the running to be the next 'geri-action' man after Liam Neeson. John Wick, perhaps surprisingly, played much better. Keanu Reeves sometimes seems to work as an action hero (as with The Matrix trilogy) because he's so characteristically blank. Not here. As the title role in John Wick he positively seethes vengeful rage. A coolly-controlled contract killer formerly referred to by his Russian Mafia paymasters as 'Baba Yaga' (a cannibalistic witch in Russian folklore), he becomes seriously p***ed off when his home is ransacked, his car stolen and the beagle puppy left to him by his late wife beaten to death by Mob-connected young thugs. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough to get the violent revenge momentum snowballing. Wick moves through an amoral world where he encounters other pro homicidalists such as Willem Dafoe, with a visual stylisation that pays very direct tribute to John Woo's The Killer. To nobody's surprise, John Wick 2 is now on its way. As we saw at the beginning of this piece, in the real world full-time contract killers are a rarity; as Joey The Hitman made clear, any pro criminal who sat around waiting for the next kill contract would go broke between assignments. In the pulp fiction universe, however, the killing just never ends.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
