Unless an action movie has a science-fiction flavor or features superheroes, I pretty much won’t watch it. Still, it’s good to calibrate your expectations of what Hollywood is capable of once in a while, and John Wick gained my attention through word of mouth with the general consensus that it’s better than it has any business being.

A few minutes in and it’s clear that Keanu Reeves still can’t act. I find it hilarious how everyone else is so much more expressive than he is. Fortunately this is one of those roles in which Reeves being his usual wooden self doesn’t hurt too much. Here, he’s a retired Russian hitman who wades back into the underworld when his pet dog, his last link to his recently deceased wife, is fridged. And his car gets stolen too. That’s all the character development we need to set him off on a killing spree with a body count that easily tops a hundred.

This movie gets a couple of things right. First, it does a wonderful job of building up the mystique around the character of John Wick before we ever see him burst into action. Michael Nyqvist plays the mob boss here, and though I dislike how he veers inconsistently between being resigned to his fate and being determined to get one up on Wick, I really dig the scene in which his whole demeanor abruptly changes upon being told who his son just robbed. This pretty much continues throughout the whole film as Wick is recognized and acknowledged. Apparently even the cops know who he is and stays out of his way.

The second great thing is how it reveals that the underworld is this incredibly well organized and surprisingly well populated parallel society. It’s reminiscent of Yakuza movies, as we’ve seen recently in the work of Seijun Suzuki, but driven even further. It could easily descend into ridiculousness but somehow the two newcomer directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch manage to make bits like the assassins having their own hotel, their own currency and their own body disposal service feel really cool instead.

Unfortunately everything else is a bit of a mess. After being built up so much in our minds due to all of the hype, John Wick’s performance in combat is underwhelming. The very first big fight in the movie in the semi-darkness of his own house is decent. There’s a nice flow to it that looks inspired by the earlier works of John Woo. But after a while his amazing lethality just strains your sense of disbelief. Why do the baddies keep trying to grapple him from behind instead of just shooting him in the back? It’s not like he’s super-skilled or super-fast. It’s just that he doesn’t hesitate to shoot while the bad guys stupidly keep trying to melee him.

As for the hand-to-hand combat, once again Keanu Reeves couldn’t do kung fu in The Matrix and he still can’t do kung fu. This was less grating then because that was fantasy land and you can convince yourself that he really wins through reality manipulation. Here, not only does Reeves lack the sheer physicality to convince you that he is dangerous, all of the fights lack a sense of power and impact. I’m reminded of this Every Frame a Painting video in which Jackie Chan complains about how Western directors just can’t direct martial arts scenes. I kept thinking how much better this movie would have been if they took this screenplay and let the team from The Raid work on it.

Unlike my wife, I don’t think that John Wick is a total lost cause. It has decent production values and I quite like how it’s a straightforward action movie with no other pretensions. For me, the most frustrating thing about it is that it’s just good enough that you hope it could be better. If it were truly bad, I wouldn’t care at all. As it is, anyone who is interested in watching a serious take on this familiar story should immediately go watch David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence if they haven’t already. Viggo Mortensen has no difficulty demonstrating to you what it feels like to stand in a room with a truly dangerous man.