As cool as John Wick looks laying waste to countless assailants, it’s worth remembering that it probably really sucks to be this guy, with each installment of the action saga piling further hardships onto Keanu Reeves’ character. By the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, our hero was on the run with practically the entire global assassin community after him, and with John Wick 3: Parabellum on the way, it’s clear that life isn’t about to get any easier.
Director Chad Stahelski admitted as such in a recent interview with USA Today, as the filmmaker explained that a little pain is necessary to John’s arc.
“I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell’s mythologies of the hero and what he would have defined as the theater of pain, or sometimes we call it ‘The Die Hard Conundrum’: We just to like to beat the (stuffing) out of our heroes. If you choose that kind of lifestyle, you’re going to be pretty beat up. So we like John Wick to suffer and think Keanu loves for John Wick to suffer, too.”
Indeed, the character has known plenty of suffering and sorrow in his journey from the death of his wife to the death of his puppy, though he can obviously dish out plenty of pain himself, with Stahelski previously teasing that the upcoming threequel will have a higher body count than either previous installment.
The director has also mentioned that the film will be “a little bit of an origin story,” suggesting that John’s past may turn out to be as troubled as his present. The next chapter will apparently bring our hero back into contact with numerous figures he has a history with, including Anjelica Huston’s character The Director, who’s said to have played a role in John’s upbringing, and another assassin named Sofia, played by Halle Berry.
From the sound of things, we may find out how John first got into the business of killing in this next movie, but at the very least, we’ll see what further trials await him when John Wick 3: Parabellum hits theaters on May 17th, 2019.