Gingerbread man in hell – Weekend – Kommersant
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The fourth installment of The Adventures of John Wick, the most important film franchise spawned by independent cinema in recent years, is released. In nine years, the hitman played by Keanu Reeves has become one of the most recognizable action heroes in film history. How he survived to remind the world of Tarkovsky and the Republic of Belarus, tells Vasily Stepanov.
Back in 2014, the release of John Wick did not foreshadow any large-scale development of the plot. When former stuntman Chad Stahelski, along with fellow film stuntman David Leitch, took on the project, it was a curiously postmodern reimagining of Eastwood’s Gran Torino. The screenplay was written by Derek Kolstad. By that time, there were only two points in his official filmography – a couple of cheap action films with an aging Dolph Lundgren. Kolstad wrote a crime thriller about a 75-year-old mercenary who has to dust off his deadly skills. In the title role, it was supposed to shoot a powerful Hollywood old man – like the same Clint Eastwood (he was already over 80 in the early tenths) or Harrison Ford (more than ten years younger, but also suitable). The script turned out to be unsophisticated, but peppy – an understandable revenge story as if straight from the eighties, the pathos title “Contempt”, and in the center – a laconic specialist in murders, accustomed to bringing everything to the end. Yes, clichés and clichés, but clichés become clichés because they work.
Who knows where the Hollywood tropes would have taken Derek Kolstad if the script hadn’t ended up in the hands of Keanu Reeves over time. Neo’s interest gave the project a completely different entourage – it gained style. Reeves’ action men have a special sensibility, from “Speed” and “Point Break” to “Constantine.” And this sensuality endowed the ingenuous cranberry about the ambitious Russian mafia and the lone avenger whom the Russian gangsters call Baba Yaga (in a few years it turns out that Reeves’ hero himself was born in Belarus) with a kind of dramaturgy. The first “John Wick” harnessed, frankly, slowly – Stahelski, Leitch and Kolstad proved to be economical authors: they snickered details about the strange mafia world in which the main character lived and worked, literally through their teeth, the action began only half an hour after the start of the film , and the corpses could be counted, if not on the fingers, then in the mind.
The sequel wasn’t like that. Work on the second part of “John Wick” was launched when it became clear that the film received attention that the filmmakers could hardly count on. But fate, as Wick’s tattoo said in Latin, helps the brave, the fees exceeded the costs by more than four times, the press at the mention of the picture mostly trembled with delight, and Keanu Reeves was awarded the Golden Raspberry in the only positive nomination for this impudent anti-award – “ For restoring reputation. And the second “John Wick” was no longer shy about anything: neither its B-movie pedigree, which was draped by excellent artists, nor the secondary plot. Insolence and technical perfection covered all sins. The new film was a two-hour hectic rollercoaster of stabbing and gunshot turns. And in the third episode, the universe of violence, growing like a mycelium, after America and Europe (New York and Rome), swallowed up Africa (Casablanca). The stakes rose rapidly. Now not only the American and European clans, but literally the whole world was against the protagonist who did not care about the criminal concepts, and the viewer learned too much about his past life. Wick protected her from prying eyes, like Koschey a treasured needle. His past was kept in the public library between the writings of Pisemsky and Karamzin – in a volume of Russian fairy tales edited by Afanasiev, where under the cover was Bilibin, and under Bilibin – bills that always have to be paid, and an Orthodox cross that became a pass to the Tarkovsky theater, the world of childhood and ballet, art and violence, in other words, a very Russian world.
The second and third parts turned John Wick from a secondary gangster action movie into a fairy tale with distinctly Russian motives. Something like a story about Kolobok, who broke all the rules and left everyone, but is unlikely to be able to escape fate – because the final destination is always the same. Although the brave, of course, fate helps. And yet, the escalator of death, which John Wick has been methodically descending into hell for the past ten years, is unlikely to be launched back (“the price of your life is the death of others,” they say to the main character in one of the previous episodes, but he still does not understand) . A world without pain, was it? Once upon a time, it all started with a dog and the trampled memory of love that this dog personified. And today you don’t even remember how it happened that a global war of clans broke out after the death of a four-legged friend. What’s next – and is it time to stop? The tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, a lesson for good fellows. And it seems that the moviegoer, who has been watching the escalation of violence on the screen and not only for years, will be able to understand it, even if in his dreams he imagines himself to be the righteous avenger John Wick with a volume of Afanasiev’s fairy tales in his bosom, a pistol in his hand and the Tarkovsky Theater behind his back.
At the box office from March 23
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