Keanu Reeves is a movie star with a reputation for decency and an unusual friendliness with ordinary people. He is also an action movie star, famous for The Matrix (1999). He is the man audiences want to see win because he looks like a good guy; accordingly, he doesn’t just cut an all-American figure, he seems to bear the burden of American loss of confidence, which audiences experience as increasingly brutal and often hopeless or pointless entertainments.
This is especially obvious in the even more action-packed franchise which returned him to stardom, John Wick (2014), which mixes martial arts with shootouts. Its fourth chapter has just been released to nearly universal applause and its largest audience yet. It earned more than $70 million in its opening weekend, remarkable for a movie that’s not about superheroes and which carries an R rating for violence, in a post-pandemic situation where movies aren’t as attractive to audiences.
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