Wick Is Pain (2025)

The John Wick franchise has been a boon for the careers of Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski as well as a boon for the action movie genre itself. It’s one of the best. Fortunately for us they have also been documenting their story as they go—“they” meaning Jeffrey Doe, director of this documentary, and whoever was shooting interviews and asking questions along the way. Wick Is Pain is on the long side for a documentary, running over two hours, and more than half of it focuses on behind-the-scenes drama getting the first movie made. It’s a familiar pile of anecdotes about options, properties, getting funding, losing funding, drilling screenplays throughs rounds of revisions (“notes,” they say). Honestly, I don’t know how anyone survives these agonies, which can go on for years. It’s great fun to learn how the Wick principals met and how deeply steeped Stahelski and co-director David Leitch are in martial arts choreography and the culture surrounding it (after the first John Wick they parted ways and Leitch went on to direct Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and others). It’s even more fun to relive the chutzpah of breaking one of Hollywood’s strictest rules: never kill the dog (which gave rise to one of my favorite quotes imputed to Wick: “Be kind to animals or I’ll kill you”) (although apparently the actual original source is Morrissey). I learned—no doubt Wick fans already knew—that Wick’s style of action is sometimes called “gun fu.” Reeves is universally beloved in the kind of way that Betty White was and he cuts an interesting figure here, a kind of enthusiastic stoner who is wholly committed to his art. It sometimes feels like he is saying John Wick saved his life. The title comes from the reality of making the movies. As with professional wrestling, it’s all mostly scripted and choreographed playacting, but that doesn’t mean the people involved don’t get hurt doing it. We’re told Reeves does 90% of Wick’s stunt work and you can see, say in the hall of mirrors sequence in Chapter 2, that he’s being brutalized, thrown around and into things. I know there are safety guardrails for stunts on the set, but there’s only so much that can be done to minimize the danger of getting the shots and scenes they get. And besides, Reeves is obviously stoked by it. Wick Is Pain is an essential addendum to the franchise.