Speaking to the unifying power of music, an ancient Chinese proverb says that an emperor and a peasant hear the same sound. The blues club I frequent has a great band this week. Total strangers dance together on the floor; couples embrace during slow music; regulars become friends; we all come together and get happy. I made the mistake of foregoing all this to go to a bad movie tonight. I thought that John Wick would be like Jack Reacher, with plot turns, a good story, and action adventure. John Wick was none of these. It was a mixture of WWF wrestling and the Assassin’s Creed video game. What I mean is that John Wick was 2 hours and 11 minutes of graphic murder. There was no story. It was 2 hours and 11 minutes of killing.
I don’t understand why people want to see so much murder. I know that video games are like that, with heads blowing up, blood splattering, limbs being severed, bullets flying. And that doesn’t make me feel any better. People were literally laughing at some of the grosser kills–as at a WWF wrestling match. I was ready to walk out after about a half hour of this, when I realized the kind of movie I was watching. But I don’t know if my partner wanted to stay, and, out of misplaced manners, I didn’t want to talk in the middle of the movie.
What bothered me most about John Wick was that I could have spent the same two hours and 11 minutes enjoying the Dionysian experience of the blues club, with the hot band now in town. Instead, I was subjected to graphic representations of killing. I noticed that the theatre was filled largely with young people, who are probably used to seeing this kind of thing in the video games that are becoming a narcotic. This also explains the kind of of music being produced today.
