Listen now | Today’s movie is John Wick directed by Chad Stahelski. We both enjoyed John Wick well enough, although it’s not really our type of movie. It’s a well made film that has a distinct style and strong action directing, but at the end of the day we just get pretty bored of it all after the first hour or so. We’ll probably end up checking out the sequels at some point, though - we hear people like them even more than the first film.
In my opinion, the John Wick sequels take the "assassin world" and drive it completely off the rails. Each one feels like it needs to one-up the ridiculous shit from the previous one, and we wind up with blood-thumbprint life-debt accounting and feud-resolution regulation rules lawyering. I suppose "comic book-y" is a good way to describe it, and I guess some people like that, but I just found it all so absurd and unrealistic that I totally lost interest.
I was also glad to hear Casey compare the Bourne movies favorably. I feel the same way; I love to see characters making intelligent decisions with the real information / knowledge they would have, and to have realistic consequences and results. Like the fight with Desh in the Bourne Ultimatum. Bourne clearly struggles in that fight, having to use improvised weapons that mostly end up being ineffective. But since it's mostly just a one-on-one fight, it's realistic that he was able to win it. John Wick, on the other hand, is full of scenes of John single-handedly killing dozens of enemies in completely unrealistic combat scenes.
The killing of the dog, or more commonly killing of the wife/girlfriend is a really common trope and covered decently in this episode of a completely unrelated podcast: https://www.epsilontheory.com/cursed-knowledge-16-women-in-refrigerators/
In my opinion, the John Wick sequels take the "assassin world" and drive it completely off the rails. Each one feels like it needs to one-up the ridiculous shit from the previous one, and we wind up with blood-thumbprint life-debt accounting and feud-resolution regulation rules lawyering. I suppose "comic book-y" is a good way to describe it, and I guess some people like that, but I just found it all so absurd and unrealistic that I totally lost interest.
I was also glad to hear Casey compare the Bourne movies favorably. I feel the same way; I love to see characters making intelligent decisions with the real information / knowledge they would have, and to have realistic consequences and results. Like the fight with Desh in the Bourne Ultimatum. Bourne clearly struggles in that fight, having to use improvised weapons that mostly end up being ineffective. But since it's mostly just a one-on-one fight, it's realistic that he was able to win it. John Wick, on the other hand, is full of scenes of John single-handedly killing dozens of enemies in completely unrealistic combat scenes.
Noooo! Don’t check the sequels! They are much worse! It’s a trap!