John Wick

***

Keanu Reeves carries off the titular hitman convincingly despite a brittle script and daft dialogue in this stylish and bloodthirsty tale of vengeance.

Chad Stahelski (Reeves’ stunt double on The Matrix Trilogy and The Crow) and co-director David Leitch offer up a lot of style and very little substance in this tale of a notorious former hitman called John Wick. Mourning the recent death of his wife, Russian gangsters target Wick and follow him to his home where they steal his car and kill his puppy – bought by his wife shortly before she died to help him cope with the grief. As he prepares to take revenge, mob boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) warns the gangsters that he once saw Wick “kill three men in a bar… with a pencil” – one of several deadpan lines in the script that provokes more amusement than menace.

There are a smattering of stylishly shot action set-pieces enhanced greatly by an atmospheric electronic/industrial rock soundtrack - with songs from Marilyn Manson and M86 - creating the illusion of depth around the hollow story. Most memorably there’s a beautifully staged shoot-out in a nightclub hot tub to the backdrop of pulsing electropop outfit Kaleida which conflates elegance and violence in a striking way that clearly owes an aesthetic debt to Nicholas Winding Refn’s superior and oneiric Drive and nightmarish Only God Forgives.

The result is a desperately schlocky and clichéd guilty pleasure. It’s a sleazy 80s style revenge movie dressed up in modern tailoring, with Keanu Reeves carrying off the central character far more convincingly than his recent spate of hit-and-miss roles. A hackneyed story effectively concealed under a glossy shell.

Hush ***

This thrilling home-invasion horror stars Kate Siegel as Maddie, a deaf writer living in an isolated woodland cottage. It’s evening – she is attempting to finish the ending to her novel while interacting with her friends online and avoiding calls from her ex-boyfriend – but she is tormented by a masked intruder who lurks outside armed with a crossbow and knives. Now trapped inside her home, Maddie has to outsmart her pursuer in order to survive. 

Mike Flanagan –whose previous credits include Oculus and Absentia – directs with a mean efficiency, evoking a genuinely chilling atmosphere and building an authentic sense of tension. The balance between suspense and violence is effectively orchestrated and disciplined – it is nasty when it needs to be – but the drama also plays out as a psychological battle of wits where Maddie, in facing her intruder, has to figure out how to overcome her physical impediments while using them to her unique advantage.

As stripped-down and well put together as it is, it doesn’t have quite the bite or the subtext of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next(2011) which was a similar home-invasion film that did something surprising and subversive with its central female character – twisting slasher conventions and playing around with genre ideas in an interesting way.

Released on Netflix, the impact of Hush may be as ephemeral and muted as its title, but it is a solid and satisfying enough low-budget horror – occasionally going beyond generic conventions and offering moments of freshness and intrigue.