Pop quiz hotshot: You are a retired hitman. A Russian gangster steals your car and kills your dog. What do you do? If you are John Wick (Keanu Reeves), you seek and get revenge. That was the ultra-violent John Wick (2014). The pop quiz is of course from Jan De Bont’s directorial début, Speed (1994).
Twenty-five years on, the film has aged beautifully and still provides a visceral thrill. Reeves plays LAPD SWAT officer Jack Traven, who, with his partner Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels), thwarts an attempt to bomb an elevator. The wicked bomber gets after Jack by placing a bomb on a bus that once armed would blow if the bus stops or goes below 50 mph.
Hello, hello
The CGI work is minimal and the credits show miniaturists for the subway train and bus. In the 90s, cell phones were few and far between. Jack commandeers a musician’s (we assume he is one as his number plate reads Tuneman) Jaguar and a brick of a mobile phone. The musician, a person of colour, insisting the Jaguar is not stolen, was a nice comment on the sociological landscape of the time.
Most of the phoning is done on landlines and payphone booths. Sandra Bullock is a very sweet gum-chewing Annie Porter who is travelling on the bus as her licence has been confiscated for speeding. Dennis Hopper makes for a nicely demented bomber. Computers were big, blocky things with black screens and green writing.
Future colours
The black-and-green colour scheme resurfaced five years later in The Matrix (1999). The techno-noir addressed all our anxieties about the new millennium and went on to become a humongous hit. Reeves played a programmer Thomas Anderson/Neo, in a world run by machines, in search of the resistance. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix changed the way action movies were shot. Important contributions to popular culture included the red and blue pill, the spoon boy and the chain-smoking Oracle. The movie opens with a heart-stopping sequence featuring Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and there is no let-up from the dire revelations.
Ten years ago, before Kansas went bye-bye and Neo swallowed the red pill, he was a time-travelling teenage Metal slacker, Ted Logan, in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Directed by Stephen Herek, the 1989 comedy spawned a sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey two years later, an animated and live action television series, video games and comic books.
Riding the waves
In 1991, when Bogus Journey came out, Reeves also starred in Point Break. The iconic surfing movie was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Point Break featured Reeves as an FBI agent going undercover with a band of surfers led by the charismatic Bodhi (Bodhisatva) played by Patrick Swayze, to crack a series of daring bank robberies. Point Break with its pop psychology, adrenalin-charged stunts and robbers sporting former US presidents’ face masks went down as smooth as karma cola.
Hell is other people
In Francis Lawrence’s Constantine (2005), Reeves played the eponymous chain-smoking demon hunter, uncovering ungodly plots, while also helping a police detective (Rachel Weisz) find out the truth behind her twin’s death. Based on characters from the DC Comics Hellblazer graphic novels, the movie has a fascinating soundtrack and production design. Never mind that the Constantine in the graphic novels looks like the musician Sting and is set in London.
Apart from shooting them up and being the nattily dressed messiah, Reeves has also appeared in dramas including Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give (2003).
With an impressive body of work revealing breadth and range, Reeves whose first name means cool breeze over the mountains, should be forgiven for the hideous mess that is Replicas running in a theatre near you; especially when there is the third chapter of John Wick coming out.
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