The John Wick movies’ real message: Wealth is violence

What kind of hero is John Wick? In the Hollywood blockbuster continuum of superheroes and antiheroes, he feels neither. He killed people for extravagant sums of money, fell in love, got out of the hitman business, and then went on a four-movie rampage to avenge a personal scorn. He’s not out to save the world, and he’s not interested in the morality of his actions. He’s just angry. As the franchise continues to John Wick: Chapter 4, his anger has stumbled into a compelling target: the rich. In the John Wick universe, no one with a lot of money can exist without violence.

In the John Wick films, murder is an honorable pursuit, bolstered by rules and nestled in luxury, to distinguish its practitioners from “the beasts,” as hotelier-to-killer Winston (Ian McShane) repeatedly says. The rules of contract killing are a big part of the John Wick franchise’s appeal: the first movie’s biggest surprise wasn’t necessarily the commitment to surgically accurate widescreen action that redefined the action thriller genre, but the vast lore the film intentionally held out. are trailers, which doesn’t come into play until halfway through the movie.

The biggest fantasy element in the John Wick movies isn’t hyper-competent gore, it’s the way people weaponize wealth. In his world, even the lowest street criminals can compete for multimillion-dollar murder bounties, but for the real players – men like John and the elite of hitmen who want him dead – money is no problem. It’s right. The idea was sold from the first moment John Wick further is that in his world, one can walk into a building, slide a token across a desk, and expect absolute reverence and first-class luxury. Everything on offer in these glittering spaces is available to players with the right kind of money.

This gives a new dimension to the Wickian gag in which screenwriter Derek Kolstad and his various collaborators/successors give their supporting players titles that evoke professions found in the lifestyle industry. Arms dealers are “sommeliers,” “tailors,” fashionable flak suits, and “concierges” make sure everything runs smoothly for every customer, all from the desks of The Continental’s international chain of five-star hotels. There’s one in every town, and an assassin in the John Wick world has everything they need within its walls – including peace of mind, since one of the unbreakable rules of this world is that there is no “business” (that is say, no murder- for pay) carried out on continental grounds.

It’s the death of Gentleman’s Quarterly, the idea that real wealth means money itself isn’t necessary. (As the story progresses, actual currency appears less and less in the movies.) What sets John Wick apart from James Bond, other than an extra letter, is that the Wick movies are ultimately about what it takes to achieve that kind of wealth and to keep. .

Consider the nature of Wick’s adversaries as the films progress. The first movie gains momentum when Iosef (Alfie Allen), the reckless son of a Russian mobster, steals Wick’s car and kills his dog. Iosef’s arrogant thuggishness is matched by the swagger of the nouveau riche. His right shows a lack of understanding of his immigrant father’s painstaking work to build the wealth he enjoys.

Photo: Lion Gate

Iosef’s father, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), is a crime lord, but a principled one in the form of Vito Corleone, one who respects his relationships and understands his status is fickle, constantly endangered by desperate thugs below and powerful players above it. Iosef’s arrogance is the domino that brings it all down, sending Wick on a journey that will show viewers just how deep this world’s criminal rabbit hole goes.

That is reflected in the changing composition of John Wick’s body count. He begins to work his way through street-level gangsters in meat shops and bathhouses, then through slick mercenaries in Europe’s Old World ruins, tactically armed assassination squads chasing him out of New York, and into Chapter 4, samurai SWAT teams. The franchise has evolved from the flashy, loud crime of street wardens to the theatrical opulence of the overlords many levels above them, who rely on an increasingly high-caliber foot soldier, in addition to regularly sending Wick’s former colleagues against him.

This escalation further entangles Wick in his former world economy of favors and power brokers. His world of assassins is overseen by the High Table, a largely unseen council of 12 people who control the global balance of power with a deeply Catholic system of ritual and reverent reverence. Wick’s vendettas against crime lords from gangster movies cause him to break their rules, which in turn makes him the target of the High Table (and virtually every assassin alive), because the system’s integrity is only maintained if everyone obeys the wealthiest of powers, those furthest from the chaos they orchestrate.

Image: Lion Gate

All this makes the John Wick movies a casual commentary on wealth as violence: John Wick’s sin isn’t just getting out of the game, it’s returning to murder and thinking he can just go back to exercising his privileges under the High Table without reintegrate. himself in his strict economy of lives and debt. When we meet Wick, his wife is dead, but he is still enjoying a comfortable life with the puppy she left him in an effort to keep him focused on his humanity. He has a spacious, modern house and a muscle car that he takes care of. He apparently doesn’t want anything.

That is an exceptional existence, as we learn from Wick’s many dissatisfied ex-colleagues, which the High Table barely tolerated. (Getting out of the hitman business, as we’re told Chapter 2, demanded that he take on an “impossible task”.) Wick’s return to the assassin’s underworld is also tolerated, until he starts breaking rules. Then he becomes an existential threat – because, as they say, he could screw up the money.

The irony here is that the closer Wick gets to the high table, the cleaner everyone pretends their hands are. The opulence becomes more extravagant as the setting changes from dingy dive bars to villas in Casablanca, or palatial estates in Paris, all owned by High Table players or those associated with them. Chapter 4 Wick continues to show that he takes his vendetta to the people who enforce and profit from violence without ever participating in it.

It’s cathartic to watch him mow down the rich, even if he’s not ideologically against them. They’re just so utterly insufferable – the Adjudicator (played by Asia Kate Dillon), who represents the High Table in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, moves through the world with truncated rights, safe even between buildings full of killers, representing the institution that makes their world go round. At the other end of the spectrum is Bill Skarsgård as Marquis Vincent de Gramont Chapter 4. He is an agent imbued with all the authority and petty decency of the High Table. He can be seen eating expensive pastries off small plates from large buffets that seem to have been prepared just for his pleasure, telephones brought to him by subordinates, and petulantly demanding why his vast army of assassins has not yet given him the life of John Wick . .

Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate

This cunning shift from a vendetta against street-level criminals to an assault on the spoiled elite doesn’t make John Wick’s goal simple revenge on one person – the movies have long characterized him as a dead man, a man who bid farewell to a happy ending. moment he picked up his gun again – but against an attitude. As with so many broad genre constructs, the High Table can serve a myriad of things: the real 1 percent, dominant religious orders, or political regimes that gild oppression with the veneer of democracy. It doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is that Wick, like many in the modern world, is imprisoned by something much bigger than him, something he can’t possibly defeat. But perhaps a death march to the root of his pain can give him some satisfaction before his inevitable end.

If John Wick: Chapter 4 has a central question, it is this: When is enough enough? John Wick has already made his way around the world and climbed the social ladder. His very existence threatens the 1 percent’s control of everything. And yet, as the movies have emphasized before and continue to emphasize here, it’s doubtful that his violence could accomplish anything. Satisfaction cannot be obtained. His puppy is not coming back, and the woman the puppy symbolized for him is not coming back. The High Table is likely to survive even as the officials drop like flies. Just like in the real world, wealth and power in John Wick’s story tend to be self-perpetuating and usually trickle up to a very small number.

Which brings us back to the question we started with: what kind of hero is John Wick? He’s one for an audience that feels a primal need to burn everything down and start over, who find the world so broken they don’t know how to start it. But they sure know who to blame – and in the John Wick movies, they know who to turn to for satisfaction.