Keanu Reeves is playing the strong and silent type in John Wick: Chapter 4, with only 380 words of dialogue in the whole three-hour movie.
The fourth instalment of the action thriller franchise, which is 169 minutes long, sees Reeves speak very few lines of dialogue, almost a third of which consists of just one word, such as “yeah”.
John Wick: Chapter 4 was analysed by The Wall Street Journal, which reported that “about 10 per cent of [Wick’s lines] are featured in the movie’s trailer, which makes the hero seem almost chatty”.
Wick reportedly says more in that 2.5 minute clip than he does in the first 25 minutes of the film.
Director Chad Stahelski explained that Wick, a legendary hitman in the criminal underworld, has very few lines because Reeves “stripped out roughly half the dialogue written for his character in the initial script”.
The longest line of dialogue that Reeves has is in a scene with co-star Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays hotel manager and brother-in-arms Shimazu Koji, where Wick says: “You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend.”
In a four-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “At the centre of it all, of course, is Reeves, whose innate likeability has always made it easy to root for a guy whose dialogue mostly consists of dramatic pauses followed by hushed ‘yeah’s…
“Overseen by stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, the action sequences here are better described as massacre marathons. The dialogue is as substantial as a spiderweb’s tendril connecting a line of military tanks.”
Earlier this week, Reeves recalled accidentally cutting a stuntman’s head open on John Wick 4. Read the full story here.
