John Wick (2014) Details You Missed: The Four Hidden Rules That Make the First Film Work

As expansive as the John Wick mythology gets in the sequels, its playful world building is really made possible by the first film's strict adherence to a set of rules. The 2014 original, starring Keanu Reeves, directed by Chad Stahelski, written by Derek Kolstad and with stunts by Stahelski and David Leitch, is a game that pays the price for its heightened reality by minding its manners with details few other franchises care about.

Here are what I call the John Wick rules. Number one: you may only kill people who are also part of the game, in approved zones, so no collateral damage to innocents or to NPCs. Number two: respect for firearms must be observed. Number three: all legal transactions must be made with approved currency, in this case gold coins. Number four: don't make a mess, which is kind of the catchall rule of basic decency. These are the rules followed by the assassins in the world of the film, and in a certain respect by the filmmakers too, and they allow everyone involved to go to some wild places. So let's go back through the film scene by scene to see how they apply.

The storm and Helen set the table for John Wick's war

The film opens on its final scene, as John crashes Viggo's SUV and bleeds from the fight. The car radio announcer reports that the storm has passed, with 7 inches of rain the night before stranding New Yorkers without power. This is thematic table setting for the storm we are about to flash back into, and exposition that establishes the first rule: non killers must be sidelined. The everyday New Yorkers of this film are just not part of this underworld war.

John watches a recording of his late wife Helen asking, "what are you doing John?" In Greek mythology and in history, Helen of Troy was the woman so beautiful that men went to war over her. But in this film, those were wars of the past. John already won those wars, and that's how he was able to get out.

We flash back a few days to John's 6:00 a.m. routine, and something is missing. He pats the bedside as he wakes and Helen isn't there. Her daisy decorated mug sits beside his by the coffee. Her hospital bedside has an orchid hanging over her, lower by her pillows are daisies, there are daisies on her bracelet, and a daisy on the card she later sends John.

The umbrella swap at the funeral is not a mistake

When Helen's casket is lowered, John has an eight spoked umbrella, but when he talks to Marcus it switches to a larger sixteen spoked one. This isn't just a random mistake; there's a practical reason. When Keanu Reeves is shot from below, he can have a smaller umbrella, because you only need to see him from below and he can hold it over his head without getting rained on. When he's shot from the side in the scene with Willem Dafoe, the actor has to tilt the umbrella back so you can see his face, so they need a wider canopy to get clean audio without the actor and the microphone getting soaked.

John says he keeps asking why her, and that there's no rhyme or reason to this life. Marcus implies that the outside world, real life, really has no rules to it; fate is cruel that way. Only in the underworld are there rules you can live by, and one could argue those rules are the reason the underworld exists, so that these violent players can live in a world that makes some sense.

John accidentally keeps the delivery person's pen, showing how he instinctively keeps every writing implement in case he needs a weapon. Viggo later says he saw John kill men with a pencil, and killing guys with pencils is something John does in Chapter 2. Notice too that John wears his watch facing the inside of his wrist when he's in fighting mode, but facing out at other times, like when he drives. That's similar to how soldiers wear their watches so they can see them while holding a rifle, and to keep the watch face from reflecting light.

Keanu Reeves brings raw grief, and the colours track John's world

Helen has written that John needs something to love, and the car doesn't count. The dog Daisy and his car are the two things Iosef will later take from him. Keanu's emotion is raw here. In 2001, his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Syme died in a car accident, after giving birth to their stillborn child the year before. Years later, in 2019, Keanu was asked what he thinks happens when we die, and he answered: "I know that the ones who love us will miss us."

The colour tones of the movie switch from warm and golden for John's happy home life with Daisy and his past with Helen, to cold and blue for his bitter, vengeful life, to stark red and green for the stop and go, regulated gameplay of the underworld, then back to warm and golden in the final shot.

At the gas station, John and Iosef play by underworld rules

John doesn't have kibble for Daisy, and when they go to get some at the gas station, you can see not only dog food in the back seat but a ton of dog toys too. This is in New Jersey, where gas stations are supposed to be full service and you don't pump your own gas. But we don't have to look at this as a goof, because John, Iosef and his guys aren't part of the normal world. They are creatures of the underworld who play by different rules, and gas station attendants don't mess with them or even tell Iosef not to smoke at the pump.

Iosef, played by Alfie Allen, Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones, mistakes John's 1969 Mustang for a Boss Mustang and asks how much it costs. Iosef assumes everything has a price and tries to force John into a transaction. Remember, even financial transactions are regulated among these players. His bodyguard, played by Toby Leonard Moore, Kingpin's assistant Wesley from Daredevil, tells John to have a good day. The bodyguard knows who John is and is more cautious about threatening him at first.

A Matrix family reunion powers the stunt work

John pulls up to the airport for some rage drifting, and the guard at the gate is reading Shibumi, a 1979 book whose protagonist uses the art of the naked kill, using everyday items to kill people. I appreciate that it's actually Keanu behind the wheel for a lot of this. He is a disciplined student of proper firearm usage, martial arts and a variety of stunts, and it shows. Later, in the club balcony fight, Keanu was sick and throwing up between takes, but he kept powering through.

This whole movie is a family reunion of Reeves co stars and his stunt team from the Matrix films. Chad Stahelski was a stunt double in the Matrix trilogy, and David Leitch worked stunts on the sequels. Daniel Bernhardt, who plays the security captain Kirill, was one of the stunt actors and the agent Morpheus fights atop the truck in The Matrix Reloaded. Randall Duk Kim, the Keymaker from Reloaded, plays the Continental doctor. This history, and their commitment to the taken for granted art of authentic stunt work, exposes John Wick not merely as the story of an ex assassin avenging his dog, but as a root myth of a decent man restoring honour to the game.

Daisy's last moments and Viggo's dread

Iosef triggers this restoration by stealing John's car and killing Daisy, and this detail will break your heart. When Daisy gets hurt, she is several feet away from John, but when he wakes up there is a trail of blood showing that she limped over to cuddle with him in her dying moments. After burying her in the backyard, he places her collar on his nightstand behind Helen's bracelet. These jerks also left the baseball bat they used in the windshield of the SUV, the car Helen drove.

John Leguizamo's Aurelio punches Iosef and refuses to give him a new VIN and papers, because he knows Iosef violated the rules: he attacked someone who wasn't in the game in that moment and stole from him out of bounds, and that person happened to be the Baba Yaga. I love it. From the moment Aurelio tells Viggo who Iosef crossed, Viggo changes. He can't enjoy his business victories because he knows his world will inevitably come crashing down.

Viggo pours his son a drink and toasts with him, but doesn't drink his own vodka, showing he doesn't actually support what they're toasting. As Viggo tells John's ghost story, we see John clearing concrete rubble from his basement floor, literally digging up the grave of his past, and the film unveils the gold coins both in John's case and in Viggo's safe.

The gold coins are tokens to an abandoned arcade

The fact that John buried the coins shows they have no monetary exchange equivalent. They are only useful for goods and services in the assassin underworld, a world John never intended to go back to, like tokens to a long abandoned arcade. Let's not forget this is all a game, a game that is currently broken and needs to be repaired.

When John showers, we see tattooed on his back Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat, Latin for fortune favours the bold, or the brave, or the strong; it all means roughly the same thing. As Viggo sings his Baba Yaga lullaby, we see his men surrounding John's house. But in reality, Viggo is singing the lullaby for them. They are the ones under threat, because John is coming for them.

The home invasion is three acts, each ended by a reload

The fight in John's home is awesome, and it takes place in three acts, each punctuated by John having to reload. It's not the shooting that matters in this movie, it's the reloading. Act one starts on the second floor and ends on the ground level, where John promptly reloads, because he never fires more shots than his firearm would hold. Rule number two, proper respect for firearms, is always shown. It's also in how he shoots: he almost always fires once or twice to the chest and then again to the head, as with the guy who falls down the stairs.

Act two goes down in the living room. When a wall separates John from another guy, John ducks low and shoots upward at where the guy's head would be, while the guy shoots straight across at where he thinks John's head would be, and misses. John anticipated the head shot. When John throws this guy through the glass door, he reloads again and finishes him, because he fired nine shots between reloads.

Act three is in the kitchen. John's gun gets knocked away early, so he shows his hand to hand skills. It ends with a solid 45 second take in the hallway where John grapples for the knife and punches the butt of the handle into the guy's chest again and again until he dies.

Jimmy the cop proves the police have a gentleman's agreement

Then comes one of my favourite moments. Thomas Sadoski plays Jimmy the cop, who asks John, "you uh working again?" John says he's just sorting some stuff out, and Jimmy says he'll leave him be. One of the hardest things to write in high concept films, or small setting but high stakes conflicts, is how to keep the police and press out of the story, because once the outside world gets in the picture, it's logically forced to become a standard procedural. This moment proves the authorities have a gentleman's agreement with the underworld: they know it exists, but don't interfere so long as the players follow the rules and don't make a mess.

So to avoid making a mess, John calls in a dinner reservation for 12 and counts out 12 coins for Charlie to clean up the 12 bodies, one coin per body, like game tokens per life taken. Charlie is played by David Patrick Kelly, who had the famous line in the 1979 film The Warriors.

When Viggo visits Marcus, Marcus is making carrot juice; carrots are rich in vitamin A, good for eyesight for a sharpshooter. Viggo offers him a contract, but Marcus never explicitly says yes, only "consider it done", a sly way of saying this will be over soon for Viggo. Marcus assembles his weapons to Marilyn Manson's Killing Strangers, with its line about killing strangers so we don't kill the ones that we love. In this movie, Marcus snipes Viggo's men so he doesn't have to kill his friend.

At the Continental, Charon and Winston guard the underworld

The Continental is, in real life, the Beaver Building in Manhattan's Financial District. John is greeted by Charon, played by Lance Reddick. In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of the river Styx in the underworld, whom you must pay for safe passage, just as John pays the concierge for safe haven. John accesses the secret club with another coin, like an arcade token, and inside the lighting is all red and green.

Winston, Ian McShane, the owner and game master, sort of the Hades of this underworld, is framed in red, because he is the traffic cop, the stoplight, while John is framed in green as the go light. The Continental is a traffic intersection for the underworld, a heavily regulated stop and go safe zone. But Viggo is breaking those rules by doubling the bounty for any assassin willing to kill John in the hotel. So John's purpose isn't just revenge; it's to restore honour to the game after craven game rigging crept in during his absence. That's why Winston lets the bartender tell John that Viggo hid Iosef at the Red Circle. The club's name is an homage to Le Cercle Rouge, a 1970 French crime noir that was a major influence on this film.

Francis's warning and the 15 round reloads at the Red Circle

John sticks up Francis the bouncer, played by Kevin Nash, and lets him take the night off, noting he's lost 60 pounds. In Russian, John actually says 20 kilograms, about 44 pounds, but Nash confirmed in an interview that by saying 60 pounds he was signalling to John that there were 60 guards inside, and that's why John spared him. Technically, 60 pounds is about 27 kilograms, which is roughly the number of guys John kills inside.

The bath house is bathed in blue and red light, and I love the lateral shot as John slays a guy against the misted window, then stabs a bald guy up through the chin, looking him in the eye as they descend. At the lowest level, John's face goes from blue to blood red. He nearly has a clean shot at Iosef, but Iosef has a woman with him in the hot tub. Only players can be killed. You could argue the club's attendees are all part of the game, but John never crosses that line; only Iosef does, when he uses that poor woman as a human shield.

John switches to a Heckler & Koch P30L, and if you count the shots, he always reloads after 15 rounds to match its magazine capacity. On the dance floor, he fires to the beat of the dubstep, so only people nearby freak out and the other dancers don't panic, since panic would mean more crossfire and collateral damage. In the VIP room, he only shoots the guys in red shirts, Star Trek red shirts, and spares everyone else. Seven shots on the dance floor plus eight in this room makes 15, so he runs out, jabs the guy's neck with the pistol, reloads, and shoots him in the head. Keanu also tends to reload correctly by pulling the back of the slide rather than putting his hand over it, to avoid catching it on the open ejection port. People think the press check with a Kimber 1911, a gun known for jamming, is in the first movie, but it's in Chapter 2.

Kirill's balcony throw and Marcus's warning shot

Entering the balcony, John reloads again. The balcony lieutenant is played by Tait Fletcher, a stunt actor who does the physical performance of Paz Vizsla in The Mandalorian. Then John hits a roadblock in Kirill, Keanu facing an actor who played an agent. Kirill throws John over the balcony with a painful thud. The insurers wouldn't allow Keanu to do this stunt, so the cut is hidden in a lens flare and camera tilt, and the stunt actor didn't fall the full distance. Randall Duk Kim's doctor then stitches John up, warning that the stitches will tear and he'll bleed but have full function. Remember that.

Marcus gets John in his crosshairs as he recovers. Some have pointed to the slight breeze in Marcus's hair to argue he's accounting for wind, which is why the bullet hits the pillow to the left. No. At that small range, just across the street, there's no way such a slight breeze would affect a sniper bullet that much. Marcus just aimed for the pillow to warn his friend. The real detail is that the framing makes it seem Marcus has betrayed John and is racing Ms. Perkins to the bounty, when he's actually there to protect him. That's why Marcus asked Viggo if it was a closed contract: he wanted to know how many people would be trying to kill his friend. Easter eggs are meant to help you enjoy the emotional subtext of a scene, not to take you out of it with some hot take.

Cloth, tattoos and torched cash: John takes back his empire

As John fights Perkins, both weaponise cloth; all the fights are well designed. John uses his arm sling to twist the gun out of her hand and choke her, then wraps a sheet around her head and punches it. She uses her leather jacket as a gi to perform a Brazilian jiu jitsu wing choke.

In the Russian church, John shoots everyone with Russian tattoos on their hands, including the organist, except one old woman, an attendee who's not part of the game and is there to worship. He torches Viggo's normal currency in the vault, which also holds quite a few gold coins, limiting Viggo's options in both worlds. Viggo later says it included the leverage he had all over the city: audio recordings, physical evidence, blackmail. To get out of the game and be with Helen, John had to kill enough people to give Viggo his empire, so John is essentially taking back everything he gave.

When Viggo has John captured, he says that by trying to have a family, John with his wife and Viggo with his son, they violated the spirit of the game and are cursed. It's implied there's a divine order here: try to leave the game or cheat at it, and fate makes you pay.

Marcus's death leaves a mess, and Winston referees the end

In the safe house, one of Viggo's men plays the shooter Dust 514 with the player name Neo, and one of the players he kills is Point Break. John snipes Iosef's bodyguards and catches up to Iosef, who says it was just a dog, before John puts him down like a dog. Viggo, meanwhile, tortures and kills Marcus for helping John and leaves the body without calling Charlie. That's a major rule broken: he left a mess. So even with his revenge on Iosef complete, John returns to deliver justice upon Viggo, because he considers himself a defender of the honour of the game. That is his root myth.

The game also claims Ms. Perkins. Winston catches her at Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, the same spot where Winston meets John at the end of Chapter 2, and in one efficient shot she's executed, Winston passes the coin to Charlie, and the crew moves in. Winston intervenes again as referee, telling John they live by a code, which is why he's not the one telling him a certain helicopter is being fuelled for a certain someone.

Even behind the wheel, John uses impressive technique: firing up through the roof at the guy he backs into, two to the chest and one to the head out the window, and reloading while charging another shooter. Viggo's lawyer asks for a gun repeatedly, but Viggo holds off until his guys are dead so the lawyer will run and draw John away, letting Viggo ram him with the SUV. In the final one on one fight, Viggo pulls a knife, and John, remembering the doctor's warning with his stitches probably already open, lets Viggo stab that same cut so he can break Viggo's arm and turn the knife on him.

John earns an extra life by restoring the rules

We circle back to the opening and learn why John needed to hear Helen's voice: "come on John let's go home." We went from what are you doing John to let's go home. John finds a pet clinic and a pit bull whose paperwork, if you look closely, is stamped to be put down. As John walks the dog home, the colour shifts from cold blue back to warm golden, on the same Brooklyn Bridge Park walkway along the East River where the film flashed back to John and Helen's date.

John has earned an extra life not just by scoring his personal revenge, but by restoring the honour of the rules. I love breaking down these rules of John Wick.

Do you think Marcus was really aiming for that pillow all along, or was he reading the wind?