Keanu Reeves is a man of only so many words, and yet they are worth more than your college education because he’s John freakin’ Wick! While it might be silly that the latest John Wick installment features the titular character using less than 400 words consider this: Keanu Reeves doesn’t need words to act because he is just that good.
In a new report, the fine folks at Wall Street Journal decided to take time out of their day to count every word Reeves says in the hit assassin franchise, and the results might surprise you. Or they might not if you’ve seen the movies– there is a lot of hitting, many guns, and not a lot of talking. Like A Quiet Place but with more globe-trotting, and the enemies are just men, not aliens. Still scary, though.
According to the report, in the first installment, clocking in at 101 minutes, features Mr. Reeves saying a grand 484 words. Most of them were in this scene alone, which was worth the wait.
As for John Wick 4, which is nearly 169 minutes, the fourth movie pushes features “just 380 words by Wick,” while “about 10% of them are featured in the movie’s trailer,” WSJ said, adding this fun little tidbit: “Wick says more in that 2.5 minute clip than he does in the first 25 minutes of the movie itself.” Maybe they spent the “word budget” on a French accent coach for Bill Skarsgard. It clearly worked!
In reality, it seems like Reeves was the one who inspired the cuts. Director Chad Stahelski explained, “Mr. Reeves stripped out roughly half the dialogue written for his character in the initial script.” Making him less talkative actually adds to the mysteriousness of his character. It raises so many unique questions, like “Does John Wick Own A Dictionary?” and “Has John Wick Ever Played Wordle?”
That might not seem like too many words for the main guy to say, and perhaps it would be concerning if this movie revolved around Wick’s ability to write a speech but it’s not. People are coming to the movies to watch Keanu Reeves kick and shot his way around the world, no matter how many words he uses.
By the way, at this point, this here blog uses more words than Reeves said in John Wick 4, which is fine because I am not Keanu Reeves.