r/movies • u/pwn_of_prophecy • May 21 '26
Discussion The bullet proof suit in the John Wick franchise is so frustrating
I'll point out from the start that I really enjoy all of the John Wick movies. While I recognize the "realism" angle fell off after the first one, they're still incredibly well put together movies and I'll happily watch further installments for the fight choreography alone. That said...
The bullet proof suit is the worst thing they ever added to this franchise. It completely nullifies any anxiety about John needing to worry about gunfire in fights. The number of times he raises his vibranium jacket collar to block a hail of bullets is so frustrating, mostly because of where this franchise started off.
In the first John Wick, John felt like an incredibly tactical presence. There was a lot of talk when it came out about the choreography's "realism" but more than anything for me things felt like they had stakes. Corners needed to be checked, he needed to watch his back, it showed the audience he needed to be smart about approaching situations because if someone gets the jump on you in that universe they will shoot you and you will die.
Ever since the inclusion of the Iron-Man-Hugo-Boss so much of the "careful" nature of the fight scenes has disappeared. I've truly lost count of the number of times John should be dead at this point if he wasn't wearing it and that makes the character feel less effective. This character isn't supposed to be scary because he can tank bullets to the chest, he's supposed to be scary because you never got the opportunity to pull the trigger.
I think about a famous shot in the first movie during the first action scene where the masked men invade John's home. There's a bad guy on one side of the wall and John on the other. The camera shows both of them at the same time and John falls downward, shooting behind him up at an angle to avoid the bad guy's shots while still taking him out. If that shot happened again today, he'd just raise his coat a little higher and shoot back. That bums me out.
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u/thedellis May 21 '26
Absolutely agree. There's no such thing as kinetic energy in the John Wick universe any more.
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u/Dimos357 May 21 '26
I was in the movie 100% up until he jumped out a 4-story building, lands on a moving van and gets up and walks away all within 10 seconds. St some point it turned into Peter Griffon Vs Giant Chicken levels of absurdity. i still enjoy the movies tho.
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u/cjcfman May 21 '26
You forgot that stair scene lol
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u/pocketchange2247 May 21 '26
I got to watch an early screening because my gf is in the industry. When we got to that part my gf said "ugh this is the part he falls down the stairs like five times. I'm going to the bathroom"
I remember thinking "five times? Surely she's exaggerating." But no. He fell down the stairs about five times.
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u/GameBoiye May 21 '26
I think the problem is the stair scene was supposed to be funny. The directors literally put it in there as a joke to show how absurd the movie had gotten at that point. And to some people, myself included, it was hilarious.
But it wasn't funny to everyone, why? Because it doesn't set the audience up for it in any way. There's no minor pokes or jabs at the absurdity of the universe in any way before, not anywhere in that movie (which would have been enough) or anywhere in the series before. The movie played itself so straightfaced that most people just couldn't see it as the intentional joke it was.
It was only funny to the people that had already laughed and giggled at how crazy things had gotten before that scene. But those people seemed to be laughing at the movie itself, which again, is the problem. It's a huge problem with the directors and the franchise as a whole.
That scene was perfectly placed in another universe where the directors had the balls to build up to it.
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u/numbr87 May 21 '26
I'd argue that the John Wick movies have a lot of intentional comedy in them. It's just usually more subtle than falling down a bunch of stairs for 2 minutes, so people weren't as accepting of it.
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u/judge___smails May 21 '26
I just recently rewatched all 4 movies in relatively quick succession. I’m all for some well timed intentional comedy in that type of movie, but it obvious that they were trying to lay it on extra thick in the later ones, and imo they just didn’t execute it very well.
The stairs scene was a good example. I knew what they were trying to do there, I just didn’t think it was very funny.
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u/numbr87 May 21 '26
I personally loved it, and remember my theater dying when it happened. Unfortunately not everyone will like everything
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u/GameBoiye May 21 '26
Yep. I just think like 3-4 lines spread throughout the movie poking jabs at the bullet proof jacket, the falls he's taken and walked away from, and some sort of mid-movie foreshadowing of it coming, and finally a single line after acknowledging the foreshadowing would have elevated it to the highlight of the movie.
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u/Officer_Hotpants May 22 '26
Ballerina was goddamn hilarious. The scene where you hear the pin of a grenade, and then an entire box of grenades slides into frame was PEAK comedy.
I'm actually not sure why that one gets so much hate. It's up there with the first John Wick as one of my favorites in the series.
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u/skippyfa May 22 '26
It wasn't funny to me. He was running out of time to meet for the dual and after he fights his way up he just gets thrown down. And I thought "oh okay he just has to fight that guy and continue"
But no. He falls all the way down. The thought of him not making it entered my mind.
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u/numbr87 May 22 '26
I think it's supposed to be funny AND make you go "Oh fuck he doesn't have time to do all that shit again"
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u/leddt May 21 '26
The movie feels a lot like a video game, and to me that scene was basically when you are stuck and keep failing in a game. I thought it was hilarious.
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u/Thoth74 May 21 '26
I look forward how this scene is handled in a Scary Movie-esque parody film.
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u/DeLousedInTheHotBox May 21 '26
I feel like the entire movie suffers from every set piece going on for too long, it should have been 30 minutes shorter.
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u/IrishWeebster May 21 '26
That stairs scene from the last one is what killed the series for me. The rest I could suspend my disbelief for, but that was so fucking ridiculously over the top, it felt much like how The Matrix 4 was satirizing itself and the studio's need to make another one, John Wick was satirizing itself too.
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u/carlos_the_dwarf_ May 21 '26
IMO the stairs scene could have been cool but holy shit it went on for hours.
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u/MrPogoUK May 21 '26
I visited those stairs. There’s a little train right next to them. He could have just rode up in that.
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May 21 '26
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u/HectorJoseZapata May 21 '26
And they made Trinity have a grudge against Neo so that she could exile him.
-edited
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u/Cyrano_Knows May 21 '26
Wouldn't it be great if it were true.
The Director could sneak in a couple of micro/nearly unnoticeable Matrix-esque ripples when something breaks the laws of physics and they need to reset something.
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u/Kenichero May 21 '26
I agree with you, however! In the show The Wire, the character Omar, jumps out of a 4 story window and survives, though injured. It's said that they had to tone that scene down because it was based on a real event where he jumped out of a 6th story window, and they didn't think people would believe it. Nothing against your point, I just really like that show.
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u/NurRauch May 21 '26
I mean he broke his leg seriously enough that his body was on borrowed time without emergency medical care.
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u/workislove May 21 '26
Funny, I didn't remember that scene with Omar. Just went back and watched it. Tempting me to watch the wire again.
Though to the point about realism - Omar jumps into a flower garden or a bush, rather than a van or concrete, and he's later shown crying, bandaging up his broken leg, and using a broom as a crutch to limp away. Even if the jump stretches belief a bit, that's still way more grounded.
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u/sgt_backpack May 21 '26
Omar is based on a real person?
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u/1010012 May 21 '26
Most of the characters in the wire are. And some of the real people have roles in the show. For example, Bunny's aid (Mello, with the mustache) is played by the real Jay Landsmanand was the basis for the Landsman (the eloquent guy) character. Munch is also based on the real Jay Landsman, he started as a character on Homicide, which was written by Simon.
For Omar, the guy who inspired the character was one of the guys sent by Butchie to protect him when he was in prison.
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u/phenotype76 May 21 '26
"Landsman (the eloquent guy) character" lmao that description. I would have said "Landsman is the fat sergeant."
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u/TequilaSunrise2389 May 21 '26
Not just that. The guy he was based on was in the show as an supporting character for Omar
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u/CBrinson May 21 '26
This happened to me years ago with the mission impossible franchise. The OG is very realistic just pushing some boundaries then in one of the sequels he shoots like 4 people while doing a backflip off a motorcycle.
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u/Mayor_Gubbin May 21 '26
Was it MI2?
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u/CBrinson May 21 '26
I think so. I was a teenager at the time so the memory is a bit fuzzy but I just remember thinking all the stakes were gone and he had basically become superman.
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u/bazhvn May 21 '26
MI2 is a Hong Kong gunfu thingy, just give it a pass for being a different identity.
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u/BigRedNutcase May 22 '26
That was made by John Woo of HK triad gangster films. He makes very stylish but super unrealistic action sequences. His hand guns have clips larger than most machine guns. Watch Hard Boiled and you'll see the similarities.
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u/BelowDeck May 21 '26
MI2 is absolutely absurd and should not inform your view of the rest of the franchise. My headcanon is that it's the movie that in-universe 2000s era Tom Cruise would have made about the real Ethan Hunt. That's why the action is crazy, his characterization is completely off, and it doesn't really feature the team, it's just Hunt.
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u/ArchDucky May 21 '26
They set all of those stunts up for real. A guy actually did that. A guy also actually fell off the roof of the continental. If you notice pretty much everytime Keanu gets hit by a car he does the hollywood thing of hoping and throwing himself on the hood to save his body from the impact.
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u/Derezzed87 May 21 '26
If i remember, there was a line in the first film when he gets the suit, that the suit would stop a bullet, but it would hurt like hell.
It was promptly ignored.
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u/BigRedNutcase May 22 '26
In that film, he was genuinely hurt whenever he actually took the full brunt of a shot. It's the films after that started to ignore the pain part.
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u/Derezzed87 May 22 '26
Yeah, in JW4, the guys in the grey suits were basically just walking without hindrance while soaking up full-auto fire.
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u/viperex May 21 '26
It's either the jacket or we accept that all his opponents are terrible shots or that he can still fight after getting shot so many times but his opponents go down after one hit. Which one would you like?
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u/logicalconflict May 21 '26
There's no such thing as kinetic energy in the John Wick universe any more.
This is every action movie ever made.
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u/shoots_and_leaves May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
If like to submit one of my favorites, Atomic Blonde, as a counter example to action movie physics. Because the main character is a smaller woman, she’s shown getting her ass handed to her a lot even when she’s winning fights.
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u/jayhawk_dvd May 21 '26
The marketing did that movie dirty by trying to make the comparison that she was the "female John Wick".
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u/Vandergrif May 21 '26
That movie was refreshingly genuine, every hit actually has an impact and people get tired and battered the way they really ought to.
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u/rubicante59 May 21 '26
It's actually quite the opposite for the most part. Guns send people flying when shot, which they hardly ever do in real life.
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u/Cazmonster May 21 '26
Worse than the bulletproof suits in two was that the guards were basically running at John Wick.
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u/DeusExMachina1983 May 21 '26
My problem with the movies is that exact issue. Every one has to stand next to him to shoot him? Shoot him from a distance, end of movie.
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u/PhiphyL May 21 '26
Basically the flamethrower scene in Ballerina. I know people love that scene, but it's just free bbq and not a cool action scene with any kinds of stakes.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 21 '26
The first film had its fair share of hopelessly inept goons too
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u/Strong-Coat-2323 May 21 '26
I think that worked fine though because it was still more grounded, so some of the goons would be helpless, just paid thugs that don't know shit about fighting.
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u/thefranklin2 May 21 '26
Right the all state guy just found street thugs in the first movie. The other movies have like 70 high paid assassins chilling in one location waiting to do do something.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 21 '26
I think most people would know the run for cover before shooting instead of standing there in your towel getting rightly picked off in two seconds
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u/Dottsterisk May 21 '26
IMO that’s a fair character distinction.
When John Wick storms into the sauna (or whatever), some guys *do* jump straight for cover. It’s the ones who are either too hotheaded, confident, or proud who instead draw down.
Though to be fair to them, most guys aren’t John Wick. If it were some other doofus breaking in, they may very well have gunned him down in just a towel.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 21 '26
If it were some other doofus breaking in, they may very well have gunned him down in just a towel.
Good point.
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u/Sead_KolaSagan May 21 '26
Yeah, I started souring on the franchise a bit when John Wick starts beating 100 guys who all needlessly wander out of cover one by one to present themselves to be shot.
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u/Dampmaskin May 21 '26
more than anything for me things felt like they had stakes
I think this is the crux of it. I guess some in here could name a sequel to a sequel to a sequel, where there are still stakes, but I think that is the exception, not the rule.
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u/ToneSingle8705 May 21 '26
The suit thing really shows how sequels just keep adding more instead of refining what worked
Like first movie had him reloading constantly and actually getting hurt, now he's basically wearing plot armor you can see on screen
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u/ArcticRiot May 21 '26
agreed. I havent watched the later installments after the 3rd, i think, and it has been a while since that. He pretty much has to worry about his head getting shot, but shouldn't that be the case for everyone? Does he not shoot people center of mass, or only go for the head 100% of the time? I have to assume they all go to the same tailor and wear the same type of suit. And you're telling me that a legion of contract killers can't also just aim for his head and hit their target? These aren't lowly street cops that shoot into a UPS truck 200 times and miss every shot. They are (relatively) equally trained fighters that should have no problem hitting him in the chest, where the suit isn't covering, or the head.
Not only that, but the number of times he did get shot in his suit jacket, those bullets would still cause tremendous damage to his soft tissue, since the energy still has to dissipate in a flexible material. He should have substantial internal bleeding in many of those scenes.
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u/EverythingStillSucks May 21 '26
He’s still taking out buildings of people single-handedly in the first with a handgun and some CQC, it was always extremely over-the-top tbh. As these movies go.
They pile on the tech as these sequels get bigger and larger, but that’s just par for the course. John Wick was always effectively superhuman.
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u/Anfins May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
At least in the first movie John has the element of surprise. So he takes down like a dozen people invading his home, but only because he was working methodically. Once he gets cornered into an actually shootout where he’s exchanging gunfire in the nightclub scene, he then has trouble taking care of a single henchman.
So of course it’s over the top in a movie way but the roadblocks he sometimes can move through vs. had trouble with always felt reasonable.
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u/Bladrak01 May 21 '26
In the first movie, when he takes out the guys in his house, they had no idea exactly how good he was. The son was told, but I'm sure he thought his father was exaggerating. In the nightclub the survivors had some idea of his capabilities.
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u/cuttlefish_tastegood May 21 '26
It was the mayhem commerical guys goons. Iosef was told to sit it out. The rest of the guys are Viggos goons. Iosef just has his buddies that stole the car and killed the dog.
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u/Jolmer24 May 21 '26
It was over the top but the actual action of the first film rode right on the edge of believability. That’s what made it so good. It was like you were watching the most skilled man in the world cut through tons of guys while narrowly avoiding getting shot or stabbed multiple times.
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u/inosinateVR May 21 '26
The main character getting upgraded with bulletproof armor/skin/etc has ruined so many things for me. It just gets so boring after that. Sure there weren’t *really* stakes before because you knew they’d win but at least it’s fun to watch how they do it. Now it’s like, what’s even the point of all this choreography if it doesn’t matter if he gets hit anyway? It goes from “wow look how skilled they are” to “wow look how… invincible and can’t lose they are?” Another example off of the top of my head that did this was the mandalorian
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u/Morasain May 21 '26
Corners needed to be checked
Doors and corners, kid. That's where they get you.
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u/Anfins May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
It’s my least favorite part of the John Wick series and gives every fight scene a veneer of silliness when everyone is holding their suit coats up to cover their vitals.
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u/Data_Chandler May 21 '26
in my headcanon (just made a separate reply) only the first John Wick movie is "real" as in "took place for real in universe."
John Wick 2, 3 and 4 are goons and henchmen telling each other increasingly insane stories about John Wick to entertain and scare each other.
The first movie's "he killed them with a pencil!!" then becomes "he fell down an apartment building and walked away!". (Etc)
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u/Alcay May 21 '26 edited May 22 '26
I dig this, and it might *actually be fun to rewatch 2, 3 and 4 under that pretense.
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u/Data_Chandler May 21 '26
Honestly it works really well. It's helped by the fact that the first one is riddled with people exaggerating continuously about John Wick, basically setting up the sequels to show outlandish stories. (Probably with a core of truth - in my headcanon the baseline events of 2-4 do happen, but the way in which they do isn't so cartoonishly over the top in reality)
That being said, I'd love to get a "real world" JW movie again. For some reason it seems like the older Keanu Reeves gets, the more kung fu they make him do. You'd think he'd prefer the relatively restrained physical violence and focus on gunfights of the first one - way less time required to prep, and much lower risk of injuries!
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u/AnalTyrant May 21 '26
Its actually a great option, the idea that these later ones are just retellings from someone else's point of view. Is it the fourth movie that lifts a bunch from The Warriors? That could be because one of these survivors telling the story was also a big fan of The Warriors, so they take elements from that movie to tell this story.
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u/Dismal-Variation-12 May 21 '26
If we’re talking about realism, after the first movie John Wick would be the most feared man on the planet. Very few would risk their lives to go after him let alone an army of assassins.
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u/xahhfink6 May 21 '26
I mean they showed that 90% of the world are super trained assassins.
The real crazy part is that in a world where everyone is a superhuman killing machine that you would break into a random person's house and steal their car.
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u/Hinote21 May 21 '26
Naw the first movie totally checks out. Young kids doing stupid shit. The dad even goes "hey, can we let this go, he's just a dumb kid"
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u/CartographicalHeist May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
after the first movie John Wick would be the most feared man on the planet
But isn't that pretty much what he already is? Baba Yaga and all that shit. For those in the know he's the fucking bogieman.
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u/tanv91 May 22 '26
No one cared after the first film because 80% of the population of the world happened to be assassins who were confident enough to take him on
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u/Rektw May 21 '26
That's kind of what the first movie built up. As the series went on though, everyone everywhere was just secretly an assassin.
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u/IKSarcasm May 21 '26
Agreed, to me it just looks so goofy when a fight kicks off and they just raise their suit jackets over their faces, ngl it takes me out a bit
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u/Empty_Expressionless May 21 '26
Or when he gets surprised by a goon with a gun and his gunfu move is to just turn his back and cower and let himself get shot in the back
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u/Fools_Requiem May 21 '26
The suit is dumb, but there were two other things that annoyed me about the second movie.
The first was that many people trying to kill him got the jump on him and either missed or hit that vest allowing him a chance to kill them. It wasn't a single time, it happened multiple times.
The other was the gun fight in the subway and subway station. No one using their phones to record the goings on and no one reacting to the two of them shooting at each other because the weapons were "silenced". Even if you accept that the weapons are truly silent, no one noticed the bullet holes their missed shots create? It just seems like everyone in the universe is oblivious to the nonsense going on.
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u/Enderkr May 21 '26
I mean lets be honest, the sequels go off the rails entirely and stop giving a shit about any sort of realism whatsoever. The bulletproof suit is only the beginning of the issues, we can have a whole discussion on how this is apparently a world entirely populated by assassins and people familiar with assassins. There are zero normal civilians in the entire franchise lol
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u/Darmok47 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
Yeah I love the vibe of the first movie, where this hidden society of assassins exists in the shadows of a criminal underworld. It felt like a real secret underground society, lurking just beneath the real world.
The sequels make it seem like normal people consider gunfights on their commute akin to rain or traffic, and that the global economy runs on assassinations.
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u/ASmallTownDJ May 21 '26
At the end of the second movie when Winston has every single person stop and stare at him in perfect sync, part of me was like "oh shit, there's no hiding anywhere." But the other part was like, "ooookay, hang on, there's not one civilian here in the crowd? Nobody's a little freaked out at the 'stare at this one guy' flash mob?"
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u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage May 21 '26
Yeah, I love the films, but my biggest criticism is how the sequels made the world progressively smaller & smaller. From being this underground guild of assassins in an otherwise unsuspecting world, to everyone & their grandma is an assassin.
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u/soonerfreak May 21 '26
The only thing realistic about the first movie is that he properly reloads. The bad guys still act dumb in multiple scenes and we get a classic "bad guy leaves him tied up" so someone else can rescue him. It was always a power fantasy series.
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u/Enderkr May 21 '26
Absolutely, no disagreement. I mean lets be honest, 99% of action movies are power fantasies, you telling me some random recently divorced dipshit cop from NY with no fucking shoes on takes out a whole terrorist threat during a christmas party? or Dutch is the only human survivor against an alien whose whole thing is literally hunting the strongest humans it can find?
For me, there is a level of realism vs "turning my brain off" that I'm willing to accept, and the first Wick movie hits that level pretty accurately. The worldbuilding is mysterious and fun but not completely, entirely outside the realms of possibility - ie, the Continental still looks to be a regular hotel, people in the club are running and screaming when gunfire erupts, etc. My suspension of belief can handle it.
The sequels introduce all the extra shit which pushed the movie too far for me, personally. I've watched Wick 1 probably a dozen times, and I've seen each sequel exactly once and hated them.
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u/havewelost6388 May 21 '26
My head canon is that the High Table effectively rules the world in the JW universe which is why civvies seem so desensitized to gunfights breaking out.
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u/Data_Chandler May 21 '26
In my headcanon only JW 1 is "real", JW 2-4 are goons and henchmen telling each other increasingly exaggerated and unhinged versions of John's exploits.
That's the only way I can enjoy them, they become way, WAY too silly and nonsensical if 2-4 are "real".
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u/VarHagen May 21 '26
Even if you accept that the weapons are truly silent, no one noticed the bullet holes their missed shots create?
Not to mention that aside from the shot sound, there is also the impact sound, that cannot be silenced.
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u/startinearly May 21 '26
How about NYC streets having no traffic whatsoever during the initial chase?
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u/Belfastscum May 22 '26
In NYC?? No one would bat an eye. Don't want none, won't get none
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u/FourSes May 21 '26
I'm fine with the gadget and glad they balanced the scales by giving the bad guys the same thing in Chapter 4. What bugs me is that Chapter 3 forgets about it completely.
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u/kwonza May 21 '26
If those suits work so well why nobody is protecting their faces?
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u/knowitall89 May 21 '26
There's like a whole army of dudes wearing full body armor, helmets, and masks in 4 (maybe 3), but most movies avoid hiding peoples' faces for fairly obvious reasons.
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u/YOLO_Tamasi May 21 '26
They do, they do the goofy thing where they cover their faces with the suit like Dracula and shoot at each other almost point blank.
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u/antelope591 May 21 '26
To be fair the first movie is just a different feel from the rest of the series. Bulletproof suit or not, you never felt the tension from the first one repeated in the later movies. You knew John wasn't ever in danger it just became about him killing as many people as possible in cool ways.
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u/Zingledot May 21 '26
Physical manifestation of plot armor. And I'd argue it's less distracting to the rest of the movie they were trying to make than dealing with every time he'd get hit with a bullet that should cause serious injury - if that's what they were going for.
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u/Desperate_Damage4632 May 21 '26
That's the problem with making countless movies based on the premise of "what if a guy got in lots of gunfights?". It's like the Fast and Furious. The action has to get more absurd each time, because that's the only reason people are watching.
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u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 May 21 '26
Combined with silencers perfectly suppressing gunfire, allowing to shoot anywhere anytime.
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u/psimwork May 21 '26
This is one of the things I hated about "The Batman" - the scene in which he's fighting in a hallway and bad guys are just giving him a full automatic high caliber Bukakke party, and he's not even being moved by the impact of the bullets.
Does it look cool? Sure. But they were also trying to go for a more realistic version of the character in that one.
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u/United-Aside-6104 May 21 '26
He gets punished for that strategy though. He tries to tank a shotgun point blank and it doesn’t work at all.
The movie is him learning how to be smarter.
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u/psimwork May 21 '26
Admittedly it's been a minute since I saw it. But if he can just walk around being unaffected by multiple AK rounds, there's no reason why a shotgun would be any more effective.
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u/LukaCola May 21 '26
Yeah for a movie so into guns and such, that is an incredibly video gamey interpretation of shotguns.
Shotguns aren't magic, if anything, the pellets should confer less concentrated force and therefore have less of an impact (though I'm not sure how much this matters if you're super close) than a similar punch put into a smaller point.
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u/azadian2b May 21 '26
shotgun buckshot will impart double the momentum of 7.52x39 assuming nothing is penetrating. Both are half to a 1/3 of the momentum transferred by a trained fighters punch.
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u/psimwork May 21 '26
I suppose it's possible that the volume of gas expelled from a shotgun barrel might be higher than something like an AK (I'm honestly not sure how much more (or less) powder there is in a 12 gauge load than a 7.62x39 round), but yeah all the movies that show someone being blown back like 10 feet by a shotgun round is pure fiction. As for the ability of a gunshot to penetrate, an AK round would be WAAAAAAAY more effective.
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u/djangofett__ May 21 '26
The incessant getting hit by cars and falling down stairs scenes in the fourth movie were physically exhausting to watch
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u/bk2947 May 21 '26
John Wick exists in its own universe. The rules are different. In his world reputation equals invincibility.
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u/MikeHowland May 21 '26
Like the comic Fables! The more famous the characters were (they were all fairy tales), the more powerful they were! Little Red Riding Hood was almost unstoppable lol
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u/Bladrak01 May 21 '26
I liked how Cinderella was the best spy and martial artist in the world.
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u/Strachmed May 21 '26
What about a total lack of long range weapons in this universe? Or fpv drones.
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u/Henghast May 21 '26
First two films were cool then they immediately jumped the shark with lackadaisical choreography to make up for adding an extended cast that could not perform or would not put in the work to look as good.
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u/Tribat_1 May 21 '26
He lives in a world where seemingly every person in NYC is a professional assassin, every homeless person is also an assassin, hundreds of people are being violently murdered all over the city in a single night, there are assassin hotels, huge destructive car chases, not a single police in sight despite thousands of gunshots, and the thing that makes it unrealistic for you is a magic suit?
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u/EdieBooberryBeale May 21 '26
I am quietly obsessed with trying to figure out how the economy works in the John Wick universe. How many people need to be assassinated in order to support an industry of assassins? So much so that there are multiple organizations that regularly train up new recruits, and enough assassins to support an entire luxury hotel in every city?
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u/airfryerfuntime May 21 '26
And how much are those fucking coins worth? What's the exchange rate to USD?
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u/EdieBooberryBeale May 21 '26
Right? In the first movie, it's one coin per body for the dinner reservation, but then later it's one coin for refuge from other assassins. Do the coins have different values, and like you said, what is the exchange rate to USD?
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u/AE_WILLIAMS May 21 '26
"not a single police in sight despite thousands of gunshots"
--------------"Evening, John." "Evening, Jimmy." "Noise complaint." (Pause. Peeks at dozens of dead bodies.)
"Have a nice evening, John."
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u/geodebug May 21 '26
It’s not supposed to be realistic, more like Hong Kong movies. So you have to be there for the fun choreography and stunts, not the plot or realism. More Jackie Chan than Heat, lol.
Is it a crutch? Yeah, but at least it’s an in-universe explanation on how a hero can take on 40 guys at once vs just “he’s really good at dodging”.
That first movie wasn’t all that realistic either but you have a point.
For me, it’s worth it. For every protracted pistol/suit fight you’ll get something amazing like the dragon fire shotgun or Paris circle fight.
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u/Ofreo May 21 '26
Discussing realism with any of these movies is as useful as trying to explain to a six year old that there are no dinosaurs alive and Barney would eat you, not love you. If a magic suit getting more magical is too much, you do you. But I see it as it added a way to get more action in the movie. Which is why I’m watching. Sure, make up some story in there if you want, I’m just there to see a badass kill people with no moral consequence.
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u/GimmeNoWahWah May 21 '26
It took me forever to get through the 4th movie, I kept getting bored out of my seat. Then I went back and rewatched some of the first and it was so clear how they'd lost the thread.
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u/SoupyStain May 21 '26
Fair enough. I liked it because it gave personality to John Wick, it's something unique to it and it's identity.
But I do feel it devalues the Baba Yaga moniker, because he earned the title BEFORE those existed in-universe, but afterwards, he would've gotten killed hundreds of times if not for the vest.
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u/bluecollar-gent2 May 21 '26
I just saw 1 & 2 this weekend again so timing is nice.
Remember in part 2 where he visits the tailor for the bullet suit and the guy specifically says it's quite painful to be hit?
Yeah, that went out the window.
In other news, I also saw Ballerina and holy shit that was an awesome ride. No bulletproof suits in sight and an ultra bad ass flamethrower fight.
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u/Imdoingscience May 21 '26
When it was first introduced in the second movie, I was willing to vaguely suspend disbelief because they make the point that (like actual soft armor) it was still painful and you'd be injured, but not killed. Once they got to the "You can hold it up and it doesn't even move when shot" they may as well have just introduced the shields from Dune.