The John Wick Universe As It Pertains to Dogs It doesn’t matter who-or how many whos-you try to throw against John Wick. The same goes for the main antagonist of John Wick: Chapter 2, Santino D’Antonio, who blows up John’s house and puts a bounty on his head that has dozens of assassins seeking the reward. Viggo’s reluctant admission that his son would die wasn’t pessimism, it was acceptance. While John is a perfect character with a dry sense of humor and an affinity for dogs, someone who respects people who’ve always been good to him-such as New York Continental manager Winston and Aurelio-it’s best to view his reemergence from a brief retirement less as the return of a vengeful hitman and more as the arrival of an infallible angel of death. He then basically tells Iosef, “Sorry, son, but you’re, like, going to die now and it was nice knowing you.” “… Oh” is the only thing Viggo can muster, his face paralyzed with fear. When Viggo calls Aurelio in a threatening manner to figure out why his son was disrespected like that, Aurelio says that Iosef beat up John, stole his car, and killed his dog. In an incredible preview of the impending carnage, Iosef is slapped by chop shop owner Aurelio (John Leguizamo) for stealing the car. (Also yes, it is a massive coincidence that John has a run-in with his old boss’s son, but fate is a sneaky theme running throughout the series.) Thankfully, this brutal act incites a swift and satisfying chain of events Iosef unleashed the full rage of the Baba Yaga. For Wick newcomers reading this: Yes, it’s really awful, and many repeat viewings don’t make the scene any less excruciating. It worked, for a time, until Viggo’s fuccboi son Iosef (Alfie Allen) thought John’s 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 was kickass (fact check: it is), broke into his home to steal it, and killed his new puppy in the process. But Helen left John with a parting gift: a puppy named Daisy, who provided John the chance to learn to love again instead of wallowing in a state of perpetual mourning, or worse yet, going back to a life of killing. Wick’s retirement plans were cut tragically short after Helen died from an undisclosed terminal illness. (Lord willing, one day this franchise will show exactly what happened that fateful night, which presumably included approximately 20,000 improbable headshots.) Which the Baba Yaga did, because he rules. When John wanted to retire from the hitman life to settle down with his soon-to-be-wife, Helen, Tarasov head Viggo (played by the late, great Michael Nyqvist), gave him an impossible task: kill all of his enemies in a single night. John was the best of the best, a killer with a sterling reputation and the nickname Baba Yaga, or Boogeyman. Jonathan “John” Wick is, at the start of the first film, a retired professional hitman who operated under the Tarasov Mob. Want to join me, or simply want a refresher for all things Wick before John Wick: Chapter 3-Parabellum arrives this weekend? Let’s dive into the blessedly absurd world of John Wick: its principal characters, balletic fighting scenes, surprisingly intricate assassin underworld enterprise, good dogs, and all the other miscellaneous things that have turned it into one of the greatest action franchises of all time. (We are legion, and we respect the rules established on Continental grounds!) From that moment forward, and after a disconcerting amount of rewatches of both John Wick and its sequel, John Wick: Chapter 2, I’ve become a proud member of the Cult of Baba Yaga. Not knowing a single thing about John Wick, and coming to the sudden and shocking realization that Theon Greyjoy had just killed the puppy belonging to the most infamous hitman in the history of the Russian mob-accompanied by a notable shower shot of Keanu’s back covered in gnarly tattoos before he broke open a chest of assault weapons and beguiling gold coins stored under his basement’s concrete floor-is an experience I’ll cherish forever. Heading into the theater, there was, at most, some earnest if not bad faith bewilderment from digital outlets about how this new Keanu Reeves vehicle had achieved a 100 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I was still in college, and my friend had been assigned to review the film for our student paper he wanted someone to tag along, and there really isn’t much else to do in Ithaca, New York. The last time that happened for me was on October 24, 2014, the day John Wick was released. It’s exceedingly rare in the social media age to go into a movie with little knowledge of what it’s about.
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