On John Wick & the Anatomy of Genres - Part I
I’ve been thinking a lot about story, plot and genre lately thanks to John Truby’s Anatomy of Genres. I took a break from reading while I worked through Hell’s Angels last week but I picked it back up after I saw John Wick 4 last Friday. Normally I don’t enjoy pointless action movies, but John Wick isn’t pointless; it’s deliberate. It tells a story. The story is what compelled me to watch the Wick series in the first place. I’ve always loved the sneak peaks into the criminal underworld which grows larger in each successive movie, giving the audience more insight into their world. In John Wick 1, the story is limited to New York City but in John Wick 2 and 3 we see that the assassin underworld is global and far bigger and more powerful than we ever imagined. Truby includes examples from John Wick in his book’s chapter on Action. I went back and rewatched John Wick 1 with a renewed interest in the arc of the storyline, plot, and genre of the series.
The first 30 minutes of John Wick 1 could be a different movie - until an inciting incident occurs which propels Wick on a killing spree that doesn’t end until the fourth (and final) movie. Over the course of JW1, Wick is pulled back into a life he left behind (either by choice or from outside forces) and now business is personal - we see his anger in the third act of the movie when Viggo has Wick tied to a chair in an old church. I especially love the scene at the beginning of the movie where John descends into his home’s basement to dig up the secrets he buried. I recognized this as a genre device - that Wick is descending into his baser instincts by figuratively digging up memories of a past life he’d rather leave buried.
I plan to do a deep dive into screenwriter Derek Kolstad and check out this screenplay. I read online that he wanted to make a revenge thriller and he wrote a screenplay titled Scorn which became the John Wick series. I’ll blog more about John Wick after I’ve rewatched the other movies in the series.
