After all these years, though, he’s still quintessentially Keanu. He radiates a Zen-like calm which makes him simultaneously elusive and irresistible, especially in the face of great mayhem. There’s still a boyish quality to his face but it belies the wisdom of his years. He’s smarter than he looks but he’s in no great hurry to go out of his way to prove it to you–at least, not on screen. He just … is.

A character like John Wick is right in Reeves’ wheelhouse because it allows him to be coolly, almost mythically confident, yet deliver an amusing, deadpan one-liner with detached precision. (This is when traces of the playful characters of his youth–Ted “Theodore” Logan and Johnny Utah–take a moment to surface.) But when the time comes–and it comes often in “John Wick”–he can deliver with a graceful yet powerful physicality.

Soon after the death of his wife (Bridget Moynahan)–the woman whose love inspired him to retire from his life as an expert assassin–Wick receives an unwelcome visit to his minimalist, modern mansion in the middle of the night. Russian bad guys have come to steal his prized 1969 Mustang–and they kill his dog in the process. The latter act is horrifying in itself; what’s even worse is that the adorable beagle puppy, Daisy, was a posthumous gift to John from his dying wife, who knew he’d need someone else to love.

(Moynahan’s character, by the way, is barely even a person. She’s an image on a smartphone video clip–a body lying in a hospital bed, suffering from an unspecified disease. She's an idea. But her loss provides Wick with a melancholy that lingers over his demeanor and every decision he makes.)

Wick wastes no time unearthing his stashed arsenal and seeking revenge. It turns out that the group’s reckless, young leader, Iosef (Alfie Allen), is the son of a former associate of Wick’s: mob boss Viggo Tarasov (a sophisticated but scary Michael Nyqvist), who is fully aware of Wick’s killing capacity. Also in the mix is Willem Dafoe as an expert sniper who may or may not be on Wick’s side. Once the premise is established in the script from Derek Kolstad, it’s scene after scene of Wick taking out entire rooms full of people who are foolish enough to stand in his way. This is not exactly a complicated genre from a narrative perspective.

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