(This review contains spoilers for the first 30 minutes of John Wick. However, it should not lessen your enjoyment of the movie)

John Wick’s plot is thus: John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a family man who is devastated by the loss of his wife to a long-time illness. She leaves him a puppy for him to care for, and he begins to bond with it. Then some Russian thugs led by Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones) show up, steal his car (a 1969 Mustang), and kill his puppy. So John Wick kicks ass and takes names for the next hour-plus.

Well, maybe there’s A LITTLE more to it. When Alfie Allen’s dad finds out about what he did and who he did it to, he immediately realizes his mistake. You see, John Wick isn’t just some schmuck with a puppy, a sweet ride, and a dead wife. He’s John Motherfucking Wick, Badass Extraordinaire. As Alfie Allen’s dad says, he’s not the boogeyman. “He’s the man you send to kill the boogeyman.” And Alfie Allen killed his puppy (a very Theon Greyjoy move, if you ask me).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the plot of John Wick was never going to set the world on fire, but it is functional. It takes something universally beloved (a puppy), gives it a personal connection to the lead character (a dead wife), and then uses its destruction to make the audience hate the villains even more (basically a reverse “save the cat” scenario). It also gets all of the story out of the way in the first 30 minutes so that the film can then focus on the action, which is the true focus anyway.

And the action is quite good. Sequences are heavily choreographed and tend to mix hand-to-hand combat with gun violence in an interesting way. It’s sort of like a kung fu movie with pistols, and fondly recalls the era when John Woo ruled the action world.

A lot of care was put into the look of the movie, too. Barely a scene goes by that wasn’t heavily tweaked and color timed in post-production. John Wick’s early scenes are often tinted green, indicating the morass he has been in since the death of his wife (and also giving the audience flashbacks to The Matrix, always a good tactic). A club scene, one of the first locations in Wick’s rampage, is an especially well-shot and colored sequence. Rooms are bathed in sections of red while others glow blue. It allows the filmmakers to isolate characters from their background, either for emotional purposes (Wick in blue in front of a background of red) or to make for more dynamic action choreography.

If there’s one technical area where John Wick fell a tiny bit flat for me, it’s the lack of kineticism. While the film deserves credit for clearly shooting its choreography and keeping the geography of its fight scenes apparent (something MANY modern action movies fail at), perhaps modern editing techniques have made longer cuts in action sequences less exciting for me. That’s not to say that I want action movie editors to go full-Michael-Bay and make sure every cut is less than 2 seconds long. But compared to other recent action successes like Kingsman and The Raid pictures, John Wick feels a bit sluggish.