Essay On the Female Characters in John Wick

On the Female Characters in John Wick 

John Wick (2014) 

Directed by Chad Stahelski 

Written by Derek Kolstad 

Starring Keanu Reeves, Adrienne Palicki, Bridget Moynahan, Bridget Regan

There is an aspect of John Wick that has been nagging at me and that is the treatment of women in the film. The movie isn’t openly hostile to women but you can definitely sense that every person involved in the creation of the story was a man.

Two female characters exist in John Wick, three if you want to count women with dialogue, an extra has a line that could fit this discussion later. The first is John Wick’s wife, Helen, played by Bridget Moynihan. Helen is the driving force for John to abandon his profession as a professional killer and settle into suburban life in New Jersey.

Essentially, she exists to make John less of a man because she forces him to give up who he is, and while she’s not portrayed as anything of a harridan, he gave up his life as a killer quite willingly, it’s clear by how quickly and ferociously he returns to killing that she had attempt to rob him of his very essence, who he truly was. This is a common fear among weak men that women are constantly attempting to change them.

The second woman in the story is Ms. Perkins, played by Adrienne Palicki, Ms. Perkins is a particularly egregious creation because she’s hyper-sexualized and yet she’s supposed to be one of the boys, a fellow killer. If however, she were truly one of the boys would she have made such a clumsy and flawed attempt at killing John Wick.

Ms. Perkins is also portrayed as greedy, a classic, cliched, narcissistic male portrait of women. Ms. Perkins willingly flogs the rules of The Continental, a hotel for killers with rules specifying that no killing can be done on the grounds of the hotel, a rule that has seemingly held for years until Ms. Perkins broke the rules to satisfy her greedy pursuit of the 4 million dollar bounty on John’s head.

Spoiler Alert:

Ms. Perkins meets her end in John Wick with a sizable level of overkill. After betraying and killing Willem Dafoe’s John Wick ally, Ms. Perkins is called to return to The Continental. She arrives in a stylishly lit park area where she is ushered into the center and informed that she can never return to The Continental. The warning however, does not suffice, as four large men emerge from the shadows forming a box on all sides of her. She is then shot from all angles.

Being that she is the only LIVING female in the movie, essentially the female lead, a better movie might have allowed her fate to have some narrative necessity, instead she is used as a prop in a secondary story and then discarded like trash, literally, a mythic crime scene clean up crew, seen earlier in the film at John Wick’s home to retrieve the body’s of oodles of dead, faceless henchmen, arrive to sweep her away like trash after sporting event.

So, Ms. Perkins, (I can’t stress this enough) the only LIVING, female character in the movie ends the film as just another faceless goon. This after she had made her clumsy, faltering, greedy attempt to kill John Wick, a task she, of course, failed at. And don’t think I have forgotten her efficient killing of a random fellow hitman at the hotel. That scene does not demonstrate her competence as a killer, it demonstrates that she is simply, and purely evil. Being that she is the lone woman in the movie what does that say about the film’s opinion of women?

I briefly mentioned a third female type in John Wick and that woman is a bartender at the bar in the basement of The Continental. Her name is Addy and she is played by a very beautiful actress named Bridget Regan. Addy only has one scene and it’s not a very important one. She exists to build the cult of John Wick. She functions as a John Wick fangirl, fawning over his return to the world of killers. Now, there was certainly little time for the movie to give Addy much weight or presence, but she does demonstrate a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers to cast a woman in the role of the fawning fan. That lack of imagination however, extends to the entire film’s roster of female characters.

So what is the point of this essay? Do I not like John Wick because of the treatment of women in the film? A little, if I’m being completely honest. I noticed the film’s attitude toward women which certainly says something about how the film treats women. I’m sure there are many other examples of films with anti-female attitudes but it really stuck out John Wick and it does effect how I feel about the film.

In my podcast, I Hate Critics you will hear me praise John Wick for its dark wit and well choreographed action and the exceptional level of detail given to sidelights like The Continental or the cleaning crew. All of that praise is true, I loved those aspects along with the performance of Michael Nyqvist as the lead bad guy, and Alfie Allen as the bad guy’s son, the character who’s actions bring John Wick back to the world of killers. I also liked Keanu Reeves whose least interesting qualities are hidden behind the film’s well portrayed action and propulsive plotting.

It wasn’t until further reflection and the reading of a feminist essay on a completely different movie, that I thought to consider my reservations about the way women were portrayed in John Wick and my appreciation of the film morphed into something I now feel slightly guilty about.

These thoughts on John Wick may, in fact, lead to further investigation of the way women have been portrayed in recent Hollywood features. This isn’t the first time I’ve had these thoughts this year, a year in which it seems as if roles for women have been greatly diminished.

Movie Review John Wick

John Wick (2014) 

Directed by Chad Stahelski 

Written by Derek Kolstad

Starring Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Dean Winters, Bridget Moynahan

Release Date October 24th, 2014

Published January 5th, 2019

Keanu Reeves returns to theaters this weekend in Replicas, a new sci-fi flick in which he plays a scientist attempting to clone the family he lost in a car wreck. While that film looks, from the trailer, like a complete trainwreck, the appeal of Keanu Reeves “Movie Star” will remain regardless of how Replicas fares. In more than 30 years as a movie star, Keanu Reeves has earned our eternal adoration as the blankly handsome face of action movies.

As I wrote yesterday, in my review of The Matrix, it’s Reeves’ very blankness that makes his otherwise ethereal handsomeness an everyman quality. We relate to him because we project upon Keanu our own personality in a more conventionally handsome vessel. That is certainly the appeal of Keanu in The Matrix and that extends also to the budding John Wick franchise. Once again, Keanu is our attractive avatar, just enough of a blank personality for us to fantasize ourselves into the role.

John Wick stars Keanu Reeves as the titular John Wick, the world’s foremost assassin. Or, at least, he used to be. Once John Wick got married he retired his arsenal of death in favor of being a loyal and dutiful husband. Sadly, John’s wife recently passed away, leaving him a present, a dog, to help him to not be lonely. Though not conventionally a ‘dog person,’ John takes to the pup as a connection to his late wife.

One day, as John is out and about happily in retirement, he stops at a gas station while driving his cherry black muscle mustang. A seemingly random rich guy, the son of a local mobster, tries to convince John to sell his car. John rebuffs the offer and is on his way but the kid, played by Alfie Allen, is not one to take no for an answer. The kid sends thugs to kill John and take the car and during the assault, they kill John’s dog. This leads John Wick out of retirement and on the trail of the mobster’s kid.

The key to John Wick is the tremendous world building by screenwriter Derek Kolstad and the film’s credited and uncredited directors, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch. Every other character in John Wick goes out of their way to talk about how scary Wick is. The main bad guy in the movie, the mobster played by the late Michael Nyqvist, only opposes John Wick because of his son. He appears more upset with his son for attacking Wick than he does at Wick for wanting revenge.

Then there are the brilliant touches around the edges of John Wick. The fight scene in which the dog is killed ends with John Wick contacting a secret, underground cleaning service that specializes in disposing of bodies. The richness of this idea is remarkable as in the John Wick universe you could make a dark comic television show based on these minor characters who answer a question that has been raised in dozens of action movies in the past: how are bodies disposed of in action movies?

Then there is the brilliant creation of The Continental, a hotel that itself could be the premise of a movie or a television show. Ian McShane is the proprietor of The Continental, a luxury hotel that caters to criminals and assassins. So respected are the halls of The Continental that even the most hardened killers are obliged to honor the rules against killing on the premises. The Continental offers swift justice to anyone who breaks the rules.

I could argue that the film’s treatment of women is less than great, the only woman with a relatively large role, Adrianne Palicki as contract killer Mrs. Perkins, is not well fleshed out and feels like a token opposite all of the testosterone on display, but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of John Wick. The sequel appears to be attempting to rectify the role of women in the John Wick Universe by casting Halle Berry in John Wick 3.

The Keanu Reeves of John Wick may have more clenched teeth intensity but he maintains that same quiet behind the eyes approach that makes him so appealing as an audience avatar. The quality that many critics fault Reeves for, a lack of a dominating personality, is, for me, one of his great strengths. He’s lowkey and passive enough as a personality to allow the audience to reflect ourselves in him.

In John Wick, Keanu offers us the role of a lifetime as the baddest man on the planet. He’s the man everyone else is afraid of with a set of envious skills that we can pretend for 90 or 100 minutes of our skills. Through Keanu’s eyes we become John Wick and that audience identifies with Keanu, his status as our resident handsome avatar is what makes Keanu a movie star who has lasted for so many years.