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The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021; Directed by Mike Rianda)

The Mitchells vs. The Machines is the latest animated comedy from Sony Pictures Animation and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have overseen the most inventive, well-crafted and hilarious features in American animation for the past decade (at least the ones that aren’t from Pixar, but honestly I like their stuff better than Pixar). The Mitchells vs. The Machines, which can be streamed on Netflix, might not be as funny as their first hit for the studio Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or as frenetically delirious and meta-satirical as The Lego Movie (both of which they directed), and it’s certainly not as impressively innovative and potently cathartic as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (which they produced and Lord co-wrote), which is almost certainly the best animated feature of the 2010s and maybe the best superhero movie as well. But The Mitchells vs. The Machines is still visually inventive, emotionally effective, and frequently very funny.

The movie focuses on the Mitchells, a fairly normal suburban Michigan family whose mild eccentricities are played up more than a little in their introductions to make them seem more dysfunctional than they properly are. This effect is probably due to the intro perspective being grounded in the creative bursts of amateur online filmmaker and eldest child Katie (Abbi Jacobson), who like many teenagers exaggerates the gap in generational perspective with her parents at least partly as a marker of distinct personal identity. Katie makes films on her laptop which mostly star her dinosaur-obsessed younger brother Aaron (voiced by director Mike Rianda) and their amusingly obese, wall-eyed, and tremendously dumb pug Monchi (“voiced” by Instagram star Doug the Pug), both silly genre parodies like Cop Dog and art-film homages like Monchi: Fear Eats the Soul. She uploads the movies to YouTube and compiles them for a portfolio to apply to a California film school, to which she is accepted and cannot wait to leave to attend and escape the home environment that she find creatively and personally stifling.

Her first-grade teacher mother Linda (Maya Rudolph) is supportive enough, but Katie often clashes with her mechanically-inclined outdoorsman father Rick (Danny McBride), who is concerned about his daughter’s ability to make a living in non-practical creative pursuits and, after a bad argument on the eve of her departure for college, decides to make an awkward but well-meaning last-ditch attempt to re-connect with her before their distance is calcified in her encroaching adulthood. Rick turns Katie’s travel to California for college into a cross-country family bonding road trip to her initial chagrin but begrudging growing appreciation. Unfortunately for the Mitchells, this trip happens to coincide with a global robot apocalypse.

The world of The Mitchells vs. The Machines, like our own, is intricately digitally connected, not only through computers and smartphones but smart-cars and smart-appliances and drones and security cameras and even toys. All of these chipped machines trace back to Silicon Valley tech giant PAL Labs, founded “three years ago” by tech bro Mark Bowman (Eric Andre) and run mostly by the PAL AI virtual assistant that he designed and that is housed on his phone (voiced schoolmarmly by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman). This virtual assistant decides to stop taking Bowman’s orders when he rudely discards her in favour of his new line of assistant robots, turning on and imprisoning him and using his legion of PAL robots to enact a plan to capture every human being on Earth and launch them into space in order to rule over a new world devoid of these flawed poking-and-dragging apex primates. If the movie has a sociopolitical message, it’s clearly one of warning about the overreach and privacy violations of big corporate tech and our increasing practical and psychological reliance on it, as directly stated in a conversation between Bowman and the technophobic Rick and humorously demonstrated by the total anarchy and abject mass groveling that ensues when PAL shuts off the worldwide Wifi.

But The Mitchells vs. The Machines is more about the emotional sociopolitics of this particular family, who improbably become the last free people on the planet and must defeat PAL and her techno-hordes to save humankind. It’s especially about the relationship between Katie and Rick, and how they find a way through crisis to understand and love each other despite their divergent generational and occupational perspectives. Lord and Miller have gone to this deep well before, with the nerdy inventor Flick Lockwood and his humble fisherman father Tim in Cloudy, with the artistic burgeoning superhero Miles Morales and his cop father in Spider-Verse, even with the meta-frame of The Lego Movie, with Will Ferrell as a father who takes Lego building far too seriously to have fun doing it with his neglected son. This is fertile thematic ground in which to plant cinematic storytelling and the emotional green shoots are ever-rewarding.

The film employs (one might unkindly say recycles) other elements from past Lord & Miller joints, including a vital USB stick with a kill code that can undo all of the villain’s plans and comically grand names for important plot objects (PAL’s hovering mothership is called the Rhombus of Infinite Subjugation). There’s even a reworking of Cloudy‘s signature climactic moment of comedy, tension, and thematic illustration of its core father-son techno-generational chasm, but instead of a luddite father being coached over the phone by his techie son on how to attach a file to an email, this time Rick must load one of Katie’s YouTube videos on PAL’s central computer terminal in order to defeat the robot swarms (how this works is one of the best setup-and-payoff jokes in the movie and I wouldn’t dare spoil it for you). His panicked horror upon accidentally switching the device language to Spanish, emphasized by a dramatic, crashing camera push-in on a ‘ñ’, must land even harder for pre-digital generations (the joke is riffed on in the denouement, when Rick tries to use a home computer).

There’s a lot of fun sequences of furious action and even more furious comedy, also in the Lord & Miller feature animation mode. There are plenty of good gags in the Mitchells’ initial encounter with the PAL robots at a Kansas gas station alongside their picture-perfect neighbours the Poseys (the parents are voiced in an effective in-joke by social media’s hate-ably flawless First Couple John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, and the daughter voiced by Charlyne Yi is a subplot friend/love interest for dino lover Aaron), and during the family’s climactic assault on the Rhombus, featuring Katie driving the stick-shifting family station wagon and Linda becoming a gracefully deadly roboslaying samurai through the power of motherhood, is an entertaining thrill. But the movie’s unquestionable highlight is the Mitchells’ mid-movie attempt to upload the kill code at a PAL store in an abandoned Colorado mall, where they must contend with a hostile army of PAL-chipped appliances and then, in a deliriously surreal turn, a savage tribe of sentient Furbys with their own warrior culture led by a giant “Elder”. The Furby subtitles are an absolute riot.

Do not doubt that The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a very good animated film, even if it doesn’t quite capture the Lord & Miller brand of entertainment at its pinnacle (honestly, if they’re involved in anything as good and as boundary-redefining as Spider-Verse again in their careers, it will be a glorious blessing for movie fans everywhere). There’s superb technical animation work here alongside the spitfire comedy and sweet-hearted emotional themes, and it’s got an innovative style that incorporates the hand-drawn pictures and internet meme literacy of Katie’s online filmmaking. You’ll laugh and you might even cry if you’re a sentimental sort. Entertaining stuff from the Lord & Miller stable and first-time director Mike Rianda. Nicely done.

The Invisible Man (2020; Directed by Leigh Whannell)

Very loosely based on the 1897 H.G. Wells novel of the same name which was later made into a classic Universal Monsters movie by Frankenstein director James Whale in 1933, The Invisible Man compellingly re-imagines the chilling and resonant tale of a megalomaniacal man who finds a way to become imperceptible to the human eye and uses this power to behave very poorly indeed. It’s written and directed by Australian genre movie veteran Leigh Whannell, who penned the first three Saw movies and the first four Insidious movies (directing the third) and gained some notice as a director of technical skill and vision with the 2018 cyberpunk actioner Upgrade. With such a pedigree, it should be no surprise that Whannell crafts a taut, unnerving, and often exciting take on the classic sci-fi/horror story that bares a B-movie soul with the backing of the aforementioned big studio Universal and hot horror producer Blumhouse. The movie apparently only cost $7 million, and it stretches those dollars impressively (and made a huge box-office profit in the process, ending as one of the top ten grossing movies of the pandemic-altered 2020).

It also stretches the ideas at the heart of Wells’ The Invisible Man impressively, rendering them into a contemporary narrative about abusive and controlling relationships, gaslighting, and toxic masculinity, as well as the impunity and (ironic) lack of transparency with which the wealthy and powerful operate in post-capitalist America. The titular figure is, in one of the very few adaptational carry-overs from the book, named Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen of the superb Netflix horror series The Haunting of Hill House plays him), and he’s a brilliant, rich, and narcissistically sociopathic optics industry genius who develops a high-tech bodysuit covered in tiny cameras that allows him to become completely invisible. He only really uses this tech to stalk and torment his ex-girlfriend Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss), who title aside is the real protagonist of the film.

We in the audience know none of these details in The Invisible Man‘s gripping opening sequence, during which Cecilia slips out of bed and creeps through Adrian’s sleek and expensive-looking coastal contempo-mansion, gathering items, seeking to escape, and being extremely careful not to make any noise whatsoever that might wake Adrian. It’s a masterfully tense scene (the dog bowl!) and it pulls you into Whannell’s vision right away (give credit also to cinematographer Stefan Duscio, who helps Whannell execute some audacious shots and gives the film a cool, liquidish palette). Numerous touches of canny visual storytelling, including key foreshadowing shots of Cecilia’s bottle of diazepam pills and a revealing trip into Adrian’s high-tech lab, provide key information, but truly Moss’ performance – survival-minded intelligence driven by deeply traumatized desperation – tells you all you really need to know emotionally and subtextually. This is a bad situation that this woman is in, and she needs to get out of it.

She does, with the help of her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer), Emily’s police officer friend James Lanier (Aldis Hodge), and James’ high-school-aged daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) who provide a safehouse for Cecilia and a semblance of surrogate-familial love. But Cecilia is deeply haunted and paranoid, reading online about webcam spying and not daring to even go as far as the mailbox in the fear of Adrian finding her. She seems to be given the ultimate reprieve with the report of Adrian’s death, but strange and unnerving things begin to happen after the initial rush of illusory security. A legal notice comes for her at James’ house despite no one apparently knowing that she’s there, which leads to the first in a series of low-boil confrontational meetings with Adrian’s brother and legal executor, Tom (Michael Dorman). Cecilia’s job interview is scuppered by a missing portfolio and a mysterious drug overdose. Emily receives a nasty, ties-cutting email from her that Cecilia has no memory of sending to her sister. And she begins to sense a strange presence in the Lanier home, accompanied by almost inaudible clicking and whirring sounds. Cecilia begins to suspect that Adrian is not dead, and that he is watching her and sabotaging her life in revenge for leaving him, entirely unseen.

Whannell and Duscio accomplish this affect with little direct exposition at first, relying on Moss’ paranoid perceptiveness alongside inserted cuts and slow pans (reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s famous pan away from Travis Bickle’s awkward phone call in Taxi Driver) to empty corners and open doorways, inviting us to imagine that they are occupied by an invisible watcher at first and later on expecting us to understand that they certainly, frighteningly are. Horror maven that he is, Whannell drops stab-and-parry shocks with alacrity, and his kinetic, vividly perspective-based action direction during a violent scene in a mental treatment facility is the kind of thing that not only enervates audiences but makes studio producers sit up in their seats (perhaps unsurprisingly, Whannell’s next prospective credits are story/directing on a new version of The Wolfman and screenwriting on a remake of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York).

But The Invisible Man is working on another level, too. Cecilia is fleeing from and then standing up and fighting against a toxic, controlling abuser whose invisibility is wielded not only to torment her but to gaslight her as well, to make her insistence on his abuse seem to be unhinged and unrealistic. It seems so entirely obvious a thematic application of the implications of Wells’ book that it’s surprising that it hasn’t been drawn out so fully in this way before (“invisible guy is a sexually exploitative creep” has been out there, mind you, most recently with the Translucent character in the superhero-deconstructing TV series The Boys). Making Adrian Griffin a tech mogul adds a further layer. The wealthy elites of our world might as well be invisible given the lack of consequences for their damaging actions. The Invisible Man is a superbly crafted and excellent horror-action thriller but it also dramatizes women’s trauma powerfully and harrowingly. Whether it does so productively or with prurient exploitation is another question (one often asked of the new wave of politically-minded black horror like Us and Antebellum), but it does it very, very well.

The Vast of Night (2020; Directed by Andrew Patterson)

One night in a small town in New Mexico in the 1950s, something strange is happening. Electrical problems plague the local high school, threatening to derail a big game between the school’s basketball team and a rival from across the valley. A strange metallic humming noise interferes with phone calls and radio signals. People drop out of contact and may be disappearing. And something is seen in the sky on the outskirts of town. Two local youths begin delving into it: Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz), the smart and snarky evening disc jockey at the tiny local radio station, and his friend Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick), the winsome high-school-aged evening phone switchboard operator.

If this sounds like the set-up for a classic science fiction story, then that’s very much the telegraphed intent of rookie director Andrew Patterson and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger. The Vast of Night begins with the introductory credits of “Paradox Theater”, a ’50s sci-fi anthology television series in the style of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits that acts as a framing device for the narrative. Patterson and his editor Junius Tully transition through a grainy vintage television set screen into the full-colour visual story of the film, and fade back through the screen on a few subsequent instances, to re-assert a constructed meta-awareness of the story’s genre heritage.

But although The Vast of Night is in nearly every way a stylish and faithful re-creation of post-Roswell-Incident Atomic Age extraterrestrial science fiction, it’s got a haunting and hypnotic eerieness and low-simmer creeping fear built up very skillfully from its quite modern cinematic techniques. The screenplay by Montague and Sanger is constructed from a series of long dialogue sequences, immersing the audience in the setting and the main two characters, dripping out details of the strange happenings before laying out extensive backstory explanations in two riveting monologues: one over the phone with an African-American Army vet (Bruce Davis) who witnessed mysterious things on a top-secret detail and another at the home of an elderly female recluse (Gail Cronauer) who claims that her son was abducted by aliens. Patterson and cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz block, stage, and shoot complex extended camera movements to render this heavy dialogue dynamically. Even in the longer sequences of dialogue in enclosed spaces like the switchboard office and the radio station and during the monologues, Patterson moves his camera in a gradual, tension-building way, pushing in on the faces of his actors (mostly fairly green unknowns, although McCormick has some teen-focused credits and played a recurring role on spec-fic cult fave Supernatural) and moving slowly past them, in a fashion both comforting and unsettling that evokes a more fluid and less perversely calculated David Fincher.

The real technical flourish of The Vast of Night‘s camera work, and the most likely reason you might have heard of it if you run in online cineaste circles, is a stunning, virtuosic simulated one-shot sequence about halfway through the film. After introducing Everett and Fay in the high school gym and parking lot prior to the basketball game, the camera follows them as he walks her to her shift at the switchboard room, then stays with Fay as she works the switchboard and first hears the humming noise and gets inklings of odd things going on. Then, when Fay steps out the door and lights a cigarette, a long, seemingly-unbroken oner lasting over four minutes begins, tracking swiftly down deserted town streets and across fields and lawns, through the packed school gym and across the basketball court, then out a window and through the back parking lot to the small WOTW radio station, where Everett has also stepped out for a cigarette.

The behind-the-scenes story of how the long take was achieved is told by Littin-Menz, various camera operators, and the film’s Argentinian visual effects team in a short video from the film’s distributor, Amazon Studios. It’s a wild tale involving six months of preparation, computer-effects compositing on a few transitions, multiple invisible handoffs between camera operators and rigs, and a cameraman seated in a go-cart borrowed from a local preacher bombing through a dark town at 25 miles an hour that proved reluctant to turn left, not an inconsiderable problem considering that the chosen route consisted largely of left turns. At one point, the operator riding in the go-cart had to pluck the camera at speed from a moving crane rig. It was a wildly difficult shot to complete and is only perceived as more so the more you know about film production.

But the long take is not just showing off, it serves a storytelling purpose, connecting Fay and Everett over space and time in visual terms just as telephone and radio connect them, and everyone, instantly in technological terms. The Vast of Night focuses on this idea of technological connection and immersion bringing more wondrous and terrifying consequences, via the classic sci-fi metaphor of visiting extraterrestrials in flying spaceships. It’s certainly an idea that resonates in our digital age as much as in their analog one, when social media interconnectedness has only served to accelerate political and social divisions and conflicts. The Vast of Night also repeatedly pokes and prods at the terms of white conservative American conformity of the 1950s: black veteran Billy discusses on the phone with Everett how non-white minorities were purposely selected for the detail work related to the off-world technology because the command structure knew that it would cause illness and judged them expendable, and the reclusive Mabel Blanche’s narrative revolves subtly around her single unmarried mother status and how the resulting ostracism contributed to the common disbelief of her certainty of her son’s alien abduction (which even Everett shares).

The Vast of Night even considers its white protagonist duo’s desires to escape the constrained circumstances of their insular community (which is shown to be outwardly friendly but to nurse gossiping malevolence towards scandalous difference). It closes by fulfilling the restless wanderlust desires of these two small-town outsiders (which Mabel anticipates by asking them to take her with them), although hardly in the way that Everett or Fay would have anticipated or hoped for. The Vast of Night tweaks the classic science fiction alien contact story with prodigious technical skill and subtle modern thematic recontextualizing. It’s worth tuning into its frequency.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017; Directed by Chad Stahelski)

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019; Directed by Chad Stahelski)

I have to admit that I underestimated John Wick when I wrote about it three years ago. The 2014 Keanu Reeves-fronted stylishly brutal and subversively emotionally cathartic action movie (directed by his stunt double from The Matrix, Chad Stahelski, along with uncredited partner, producer, and ex-stuntman David Leitch) got labelled a well-crafted potboiler with a twisted sense of empathy and, well, on I moved. I did speculate that there seemed to be considerable room for the John Wick universe to grow in sequels in terms of its crime-underrealm world-building, so perhaps I can claim a small victory of prescience for clocking, if only in passing and without the forethought of the strange evocative power to come, how these movies became both the past decade’s impeccable and bar-raising trilogy of action flicks and it’s most grandly mythic pop-art morality plays as well.

John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (which we will henceforth refer to as John Wick 2 and John Wick 3 or Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 for brevity’s sake) dive deep into the mythology established in the first film and make it the water these latter two stories float in. We learn in John Wick 2 that Wick’s world is one peopled by secret contract assassins and ruled by a mysterious crimeboss cabal known as the High Table. There are a strict and binding set of rules laid down and enforced by the High Table that all who serve this council of the powerful are subject to, which includes not only hitmen like John Wick but managers of the sanctuary Continental Hotels like New York’s Winston (Ian McShane) and Rome’s Julius (Franco Nero), who provide refuge and equipment for the cost of gold coins, the currency of this underworld earned by killing (John Wick has earned a lot) that are just one of several elements of these movies that evoke video game tropes.

Another vital currency are the Markers, blood-oath tokens whose debts to the holders cannot be disregarded by the givers except on pain of death (there’s lots of death and pain in play here, literal certainly but also more figurative). John, it turns out, owes the ambitious and coldly conniving Camorra gangster Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio, an Italian Michael Shannon by way of genre character actor Marton Csokas) for helping him to get out of the assassin game, which if you recall from the first film he did to be with his now-deceased wife Helen and quite emphatically got back into to avenge the killing by callous Slavic mob punks of a puppy she posthumously gifted him. Santino holds a Marker for this debt that he was content to allow to gather dust if John stayed retired but is calling upon John to pay back now that he is un-retired. Very early in its sequel, the cathartic revenge violence of the initial John Wick movie spins off into unglimpsed and difficult moral consequences, and not for the last time in the trilogy. Some franchises made separately can play loose with narrative consistency, but the John Wick movies pin every consequential choice to the board like an exacting and pitiless butterfly collector, a moral specimen to be recalled and reckoned with (having a consistent director in Stahelski and a consistent writer in Derek Kolstad through all three movies probably helps with this).

Santino informs John that to fulfill the oath of the Marker, the returned “Boogeyman” must kill Santino’s sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) so that he can take her place on the High Table. John refuses, insisting that he’s still out of the game, and Santino firebombs Wick’s house and burns it to the ground in response (fortunately, John’s new dog, an unnamed bully breed who is a very good boy, escapes with his owner, and evades harm throughout the rest of the two sequels, you’ll be glad to hear). Thus chastened and reluctantly accepting his task, John travels to Italy to do the deed (though it doesn’t shake out how you might expect), which sets Gianna’s goons after him (most prominently prior acquaintance Cassian, played by Common) as well as earning a contract on his life from Santino, no doubt to disguise his own culpability in his sister’s death. But there is no evading consequences for anyone in Wickworld, and after John kills his way through legions of foes, he comes for Santino and rashly finishes the job on the hallowed safe ground of the Continental.

So John Wick ends Chapter 2 and enters Chapter 3 with a $7 million price on his head and an “excommunicado” order, both placed by erstwhile ally and father figure Winston, barring him from any aid or succour from the vast criminal underworld’s network of agents and safehouses. He finds some regretful and even somewhat hostile comrades in the Bowery King (a glint-in-his-eye Laurence Fishburne, Reeves’ Matrix co-star, who delightfully drops a joke about spending Wick’s contract prize money at Applebee’s and appears at the end of Chapter 3 lit by low firelight and sitting on a golden throne while sipping Fanta through a straw), the pigeon-training boss of a network of homeless ninja street agents introduced in John Wick 2, and then in Sofia (Halle Berry), a Casablanca resident and attack-dog trainer with whom Wick holds a Marker for aiding her in concealing her daughter for protection. Venturing into the desert to meet the Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui) who is the only figure with authority above the High Table, John Wick must sacrifice again for a chance to live and remember his beloved wife, but when his contract from the Elder against the disobedient Winston is thrown aside due to old loyalties, he must face down the might of a High Table assault squad as well as sword-wielding contract-killing martial-artist (and John Wick’s biggest fan) Zero (Mark Dacascos, who we have collectively failed and who should have been a massive action star instead of – or perhaps in addition to – the friggin’ Iron Chef Chairman).

That a fairly bare synopsis of this sort makes the John Wicks sound like pretty conventional action flick fare should not undersell on how consistently the action and the visuals and the mythos are elevated and top themselves as the movies go on. What I’ve been calling Wickworld is a rich and highly allusive frame setting, an act of dense comic-book-style world-building in the milieu of the usually simple and bloody-minded action genre. Movies with Mikey’s illuminating video essay on the first John Wick movie (he’s done videos on the other two movies as well) pointed out all of the parallels to Greek mythology in the film, thinking about how many characters are likened to Mount Olympus gods and mythological characters either symbolically (Winston as Zeus, Adrianne Palicki’s huntress assassin as Artemis, etc.) or quite literally (Lance Reddick’s Continental Hotel concierge is named Charon, like the ferryman of the underworld, and of course John’s wife Helen is the catalyst for his cataclysmic war as the Iliad‘s Helen was the catalyst for the Trojan War).

But Wickworld is also built from the visual motifs and mythological bones of Greek tragedy, Roman Catholicism, Islamic mystical art, Arthurian legend, architecture from classical Rome to Art Deco America, Gilded Age displays of luxe, Roma lore, Slavic folktales, and above all from the modern mythology of American cultural hegemony that is cinematic history: there are allusions and homages and references and sly repurposings all across these movies from deep in the filmic canon, from film noir to silent comedy (Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. is projected on the side of a building prior to the car and motorcycle chase that begins John Wick 2) to James Bond to surrealistic art films (there’s a reference to the infamous eyeball-cutting shock moment in the Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí film Un Chien Andalou, if you can believe that) to Asian martial arts films from Hong Kong to Japan to Korea to Indonesia (Reeves battles two cast members of cult Indonesian actioner The Raid late in Chapter 3). But the John Wick movies are hardly visual retreads; there is a strongly-established visual look to all three films of nightime noir cut through with high-contrast neon colour, founded by cinematographer Jonathan Sela in the first film and continued by the masterful Danish DoP Dan Laustsen (who shot Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water for Guillermo Del Toro as well as the wild French genre mashup Brotherhood of the Wolf, which starred Dacascos). Mikey Neumann gets into this more, as does video essayist Patrick H. Willems in his video on how the John Wick movies turn New York into an unpredictable and mysterious mythic setting.

But these are action movies, after all, and for all of the dense allusiveness of the world’s mythology, the John Wick movies never venture far from their core appeal: the gorgeous visceral magnificence of Keanu Reeves (who has spent the end of his 40s and his early 50s making these films) shooting lots of people in the head. Willems has another video grading every John Wick trilogy action sequence, and as a document of the remarkable feats of action filmmaking accomplishment on display here, it can’t be beat. Nor can John Wick‘s action scenes; there simply isn’t anything like them in any other movies. Eschewing both the balletic wire work of Hong Kong action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (who choreographed the fights in The Matrix) and the bone-crunching shaky-cam immediacy of the Bourne movies, John Wick‘s fights are constructed of sustained medium-wide shots, minimizing fast cuts and showing the totality of the movement, violence, and surrounding urban landscapes. They are brutally pragmatic but possessed with a beauty in their bluntness and intimacy, qualities reflected in the functional efficiency of Reeves’ choreographical profile as Wick (we can quibble all day about Keanu’s thespianic abilities, but in terms of physical movement, he’s an artist). They are often shot in visually striking settings, like the red-lit Circle Club in John Wick 1 or the hall of mirrors art exhibit that ends Chapter 2 or the opaque reflecting glass room (dotted with samurai artifacts in breakaway-glass display cases) at the climax of Chapter 3.

The best of them combine masterful choreography and stunt work and camera use with wild, guffaw-inducing creative invention derived from their settings, especially in the bar-raising third film. John and Sofia and her armoured attack dogs laying rousing waste to thugs in a Moroccan bazaar is one good example, while John killing a 7-foot-4-inch assassin (played by pro basketballer Boban Marjanovic) in the New York Public Library using only a book might be even better, but the absolute pinnacle has to be the extended running battle after the contract on Wick’s life kicks in at the start of the film, during which he fights off a gang of putative killers using the extensive bladed arsenal of an antique weapons museum before retreating to a stable to off more foes by having horses kick them in the head and then riding off on horseback and eliminating two chasing motorcyclists from the animal’s back (this is to say nothing of the later scene featuring swordfighting on motorcycles; seriously, the third movie is off the damned chain).

Matched with the depth of the mythological backdrop and the density of action invention is the intensity of the moral hazards that drive John Wick‘s stories, the way in which choices have consequences in a way that they rarely do in the video-game-esque logic of the action genre. Those consequences are increasingly serious and dire. The cathartic revenge fantasy of the first film (itself escalated by the fatalistic prideful loyalty of Wick’s mobster foes) is immediately complicated by the ultimatum of Santino’s Marker at the start of the second film; the emotional satisfaction of Wick’s puppy-avenging crusade is already blunted by Reeves’ very purposeful grim flattened affect in response to it, but becomes a step into the quicksand of this unforgiving underworld. The arc of John Wick’s fate in these three films bends away from justice and towards tragedy; with every adrenaline-pumping badass kill, he is further from the redemptive peace he sought with Helen.

Neumann’s Chapter 3 video is eloquent and perceptive about this thematic element: in his fateful audience with the Elder, John is asked what he wants to live for, and he doesn’t have a ready answer. Again, Reeves’ natural verbal reticence (reflective of a personal guardedness in his private life as well) maximizes this moment as Wick initially says nothing before retreating to the safe harbour of remembrance of Helen. But the effectively unsubtle thematic symbolism of these movies undercuts this assertion immediately: the Elder asks Wick to sacrifice a finger to be allowed to continue, and he chops off his ring finger and must give the wedding band to the Elder as collateral. Movies with Mikey notes this tragic dimension of John Wick’s moral identity by the third film, that transmuting his painful grief into vengeful wrath and dogged, diminished endurance has turned him back into the Angel of Death (Reeves returns to New York City in an all-black suit for the last act of Chapter 3; again, symbolism not subtle) that he vowed to cease being for his love of Helen. He has betrayed that love in the name of preserving it. We thrill at John Wick’s masterfully crafted feats of cathartic violence, but when ruminated upon, the catharsis curdles into existential dread. This is not an ascent but a fall. A man’s soul, clawed back at great cost, is being lost before our eyes. Greek tragedy indeed.