With its violently imaginative action sequences and extreme style-over-substance philosophy, you don’t expect Keanu Reeves’ John Wick franchise to spark a “can you separate the art from the artist?” conversation. But here we are.
As the titular bringer of death, the real-life nice guy Reeves plays the role of the franchise’s avenging assassin with a stoic and singular determination. Over the course of four films, he relentlessly and very cooly dispatched any baddie associated with the gangster who murdered his puppy.
Right from the jump in 2014, John Wick shot straight to the top of the globe’s premiere action franchises. It modernised the bullet-fests of 80s action classics like Cobra and Commando and did so in a gloriously flashy manner. As cinema, the films are great fun.
With that success, a television spin-off is not wholly surprising. Streaming now on Prime Video, The Continental: From the World of John Wick is a three-part, feature-length prequel series set in the 1970s. It tells the tale of how Winston Scott, who was played by Ian McShane in the movies, comes to be the proprietor of The Continental, the franchise’s luxury hotel that operates as a safe space for the world’s assassins.
What does raise an eyebrow is the casting of Mel Gibson, the disgraced former action hero whose reputation was tarnished by racism, anti-semitism and allegations of domestic violence.
