4 Characters that are the titles of their movie

Trying to think of my favorite movies with the name of the protagonist in the title, or at least the name of a major character.

#4. Dredd

Dredd is about a bureaucrat who blindly follows procedure. What I think is interesting is that the portrayal of Dredd casts him as a sympathetic character, especially when compared to the corrupt bureaucrats he encounters. Dredd may be ruthless and inflexible, but he’s never corrupt. I think it’s great that the movie ends with Dredd fudging the rules just a little bit, showing that underneath his attempts to suppress his humanity, a spark of an idealist still burns.

#3. John Wick

John Wick is a monster in his universe. Seriously, he is one evil dude. The thing that keeps him from being despicable is that while he is a killer who cannot be stopped, he doesn’t kill people for no reason. An important element of the John Wick storyline is that John Wick is in the right. He is the wronged party and while his actions are monstrous in scope, they are also apparently acceptable within the limits of his world.

#2. Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher is a fully despicable character in my book, but the movie doesn’t seem to realize this. It’s this disconnect, and the fact that the movie is actually a good action thriller, that elevates this movie to greatness. Jack Reacher is a kind of Libertarian Batman, who cannot be restrained by your laws, man. He towers above the pygmies that make up all of mortal humanity, obeying not the laws of ye lesser men, but the higher Jack Reacherean Law. Oddly enough, what makes Jack Reacher palatable to me is just how seriously he takes himself. Jack Reacher could never be caught farting, for example, because he would then kill himself. At the same time, Jack Reacher thinks he’s hilarious, but hilarious in Grandpa’s idea of a cool guy kind of way. This is a wonderful movie.

#1. Mad Max: Fury Road

Max has an interesting arc. He starts off as he describes himself: a being reduced to the single instinct to survive. He’s not heroic at all, and in fact is basically one of the bad guys. But through the course the movie he regains his humanity and basically becomes Mad Max again, and goes from a feral human to a straightup badass hero. It’s an awesome journey and while it might be fast it’s only because Max has no time for angst.

Are the fights in the Matrix different than the fights in John Wick?

A comment by my roommate kicked off this line of thought. Are the fight scenes in John Wick really any different than those in The Matrix?

Yes, totally different. Thanks for asking though, since I haven’t revisited The Matrix in a long time. Keanu Reeves has starred in some of my favorite movies, and obviously The Matrix is still amazing even after a decade or so since its release. John Wick is also a fantastic action movie, but a close watching of both shows dramatically different aesthetics when it comes to fighting.

Let’s take a look at probably the best fight scene in the entire Matrix trilogy: Neo vs Agent Smith in the Subway.

Now bear in mind I’m not an expert, I’ve just watched a lot of action movies.

If you watch this fight scene what’s immediately apparent is the massive influence from kung-fu movies. Do you see that dust rising up off Neo when he stands up and defiantly postures? Do you also noticed the sped up camera work? Also the emphasis on upright striking? Both Neo and Agent Smith favor strikes over grapples and rarely, if ever, go to grappling and ground fighting. There are some throws, but most of the throws are superhuman strength based pick-up-and-toss style attacks. It’s definitely an incredible fight and I’ve never gotten tired of watching it.

Now, let’s watch one of the best fight scenes in John Wick, the Club Scene:

As you watch this scene you might notice that John Wick doesn’t fight like your typical action hero. The modern action hero fights in a way reminiscent of the Bourne movies with a little Dark Knight thrown into the mix. What usually sticks in my mind is the emphasis on striking, and fast combinations that alter attack directions rapidly, as well as deflecting other attacks. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what we see in John Wick. There’s several things striking about the fighting style in the Club Scene. One, John Wick uses his gun as a close combat weapon. Not as the exception, but as the rule. He gets in close to people and shoots them. Typically in action movies it’s one or the other, the hero either punches or he shoots, but rarely does he combine them as thoroughly as John Wick does. Two, John Wick, while he does strike, heavily favors a more judo/jiu-jitsu approach to combat. On more than one occasion he gets in very close to his opponents and goes with them to the ground, where he grapples with them. This is significantly different than many action movies. He also throws, in a judo style, far more heavily than any other action hero I can think of. And, while he is good at hand-to-hand combat, it’s actually noticeably harder for him to defeat opponents when he’s disarmed. Whether this is a nod to realism or an in-universe weakness on John Wick’s part, it’s unclear.

Another more subtle element of John Wick’s fighting style, say in contrast to Neo, is his methodical brutality. John Wick kills his opponents. Neo will enter a lobby and gun down enemies. John Wick pretty much executes every single person he encounters. This movie has the highest amount of explicit head shots I’ve ever seen in an action movie. The result does give John Wick a far more ruthless quality than most action heroes. Some goons might survive an encounter with Neo but no one survives an head on fight with John Wick.

I’m not saying one is necessarily better than the other, they’re just trying to do, and reference, different things and I enjoy them both.

John Wick(ed Witch)

I’ve been thinking about John Wick and one thing I think is interesting is that the John Wick world is a kind of fairy tale land. There’s a literal underworld that you can enter if you pay the price, a reference to the fee due to Chairon to cross the river Styx I suspect. There’s a scene in a hotel where John is shown to be descending down and down beyond the regular world until he finally reaches a door that can only be entered after first paying with a gold coin. And there he meets Ian McShane, who I assume is a kind of Hades figure.

Note: A bartender in the underworld tells him that she’s never seen him as vulnerable before. This is something that I think comes back later.

The movie drops clues about the fairy tale nature, though at the time I just thought it was hyperbole on the characters’ part:

They, these Russian mobsters, refer to John Wick as Baba Yaga. I thought this was an odd choice because Baba Yaga is a witch from Russian folklore. She is a hideous figure, apparently at times benign and other times malevolent, who lives in a house that walks on chicken legs. Why choose a female demi-god from Russian mythology for John Wick?

Then there’s the dissonance around the character of John Wick himself. Part of what I enjoyed about John Wick is the comedy around the character the audience knows as John Wick and the John Wick everyone else is reacting to. John Wick that the audience observes is a quiet unassuming man, almost a blank slate really. Everyone else seems to recoil in horror to him, though, and that just seems so at odd with what we observe that it’s hilarious.

But then there’s the scene where John Wick is tied to a chair and he tells his former boss that he’s back and to give him his son. That’s the Baba Yaga! That’s the person everyone was so scared of. He’s the man who will take your children away. He will force you to sacrifice your own children. I think John Wick was like that all the time in the period before the movie. So when the bartender says she’s never seen him vulnerable it’s because he was too busy doing the assassin equivalent of eating babies to stop and care about anything. Suddenly the movie cleverly reveals that John Wick is monstrous to the point of mythological being. They call him Baba Yaga because there’s nothing else that comes close to representing him.

Then the rest of the movie fell into place for me, in the fairy tale sense. A bad little boy went into the woods and broke into the house of a witch who lived there, waking the witch. Then the witch came and ate him. The cleverness of the movie is that we don’t realize that John Wick is the monster because for most of the movie we only know him as a pretty mellow guy.

I think that this is further emphasized by how John will spare “good children” from his wrath: specifically Aurelio the chop shop owner and Francis the door guard. Both are contrite and respectful to John, and so are spared. But the unrepentant son of the mob boss is hunted down and mercilessly killed. The entire movie is a two hour action movie equivalent of “be good or Santa Claus will shoot you in the head.”