John Wich Series is one of the action movies that succeeded in these few years. First Chapter was released in 2014, and there is a plan for chapter 5 for the future, so it is easy to see how it successfully sold it to customers, and Indeed it earned 86,013,056USD worldwide (IMDbPro). In this action movie, John Wick-former assassin acted by Keanu Reeves kills mafias for the revenge of his dog and fight for his survival, and from Chapter One to Three, and in consequence, he kills more than 300 people. The kill count is more than the combined kill counts of Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th and Michael Myers of Halloween (John). This vast execution is one of the selling points of this series. In this analysis, I will focus on the dark and lightless direction and the protagonist’s age to see the pattern of recent  Hollywood movies.

First, the mise en scene of the John Wick series tends to be darker or lightless for entire sets. For example, John Wick always wears black jackets, even his shirts and ties are sometimes black or grey, and he has black hair. In chapter 1, there is only one fighting scene with daylight, and other locations are either at night or inside buildings; the ending of chapter 1 is also night, and he disappears into the city. Of course, this is a movie of revenge, and the tone is sad or angry, so there are no points that make it shiny like Dead Pool. However, Ayse et al. found that “the overall decline in luminance was reliable for all genres … except animation,” and this is because of the improvement and changes of technologies (Salt, qtd in Ayse et al.), and the environment of theatres, which is dark(Lin and Yan, Smith qtd in Ayse et al.)  There was the development of the equipment for producers to make the darker mise en scene, and Hollywood movies, including the John Wicks, can effectively show the movie’s tone for watchers.

Second, the protagonist’s age has an essential role in the tempo of the actions and the movie’s theme. In the movie series, John Wick seems like 40 or 50 years old and not young, despite the energy we can feel from him in the movie. And it is one of the reasons he does not act like heroes in American Comic movies or Jackie Chan in the 1970s; thus, the camera movement is also slower than those. I found the similarities between John Wick and Expendables for the age of the main characters; the actors, Sylvester Stallone and  Keanu Charles Reeves, are no longer young now.  Ellexis and Sean state that “the Expendables invites us to think about forms of economic struggle and labour beyond the “managerial class” of “recession films” like Up in the Air and The Company Men,” and John Wick is a revenge story to the big organization. Based on the fact above, some people can feel sympathy and better by acting as an avenger to the unreasonable events.

References

Boyle, Ellexis and Brayton Sean. “Ageing Masculinities and “Muscle work” in Hollywood Action Film An Analysis of The Expendables.” Men and Masculinities 15(5) (2012): 468-485. <https://ezproxy.tru.ca/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2012-30556-002&site=eds-live&scope=site>.

Cutting, James, et al. “Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years.” I-perception 2(6) (2011): 539-576. 24 Nov 2021. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485803/>.

IMDbPro. John Wick (2014). n.d. 25 Nov 2021. <https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt2911666/?ref_=bo_se_r_1>.

Squires, Jhon. In Just Three Movies, John Wick Has Killed More People Than Jason and Michael’s Combined Total. 23 May 2019. News. 25 Nov 2021. <https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3562954/just-three-movies-john-wick-killed-people-jason-michaels-combined-total/>.