At this point, it would be very difficult to separate the role of John Wick from Keanu Reeves. Ten years ago, the Point Break, Speed and The Matrix star stepped into the unforgettable part of a retired assassin who is pulled back into the global game of espionage when two thugs murder his dog. Big mistake. The senseless death of his pet sends John Wick on a vengeful mission through the underbelly of a massive crime syndicate. The mission took the majority of four John Wick movies, while also expanding to include TV shows, a prequel, and a spinoff starring Ana de Armas as The Ballerina.
But how different might the John Wick franchise have looked if Bruce Willis had appeared in the role, as has been revealed?
While speaking with The Hollywood Reporter for the tenth anniversary of John Wick, producer and The Fall Guy director David Leitch revealed that when he and director Chad Stahelski learned about the project, Bruce Willis was attached to the script. Leitch and Stahelski even said that they entertained doing John Wick with Willis before they brought the story to Keanu Reeves, who they knew from working on the Matrix movies (Stahelski was one of Reeves’ stunt doubles in the trilogy). And now I can’t stop thinking about how different these seminal action movies would have been with Willis in the lead role. In some ways, they might even have been better.
The primary difference would have been the age of the protagonist, which Chad Stahelski and David Leitch would have had to address up front. Ten years ago, Willis would have been 59, almost a decade older than Reeves, who was 49 or 50 when he worked on the first John Wick movie. To get a sense of Willis’ physicality at that time, he was starring in the Sin City sequel, A Dame to Kill For, and still had a decade of direct-to-DVD action movies in his future. He’d also have just done RED 2, so the idea of him toplining a vengeance flick like John Wick wouldn’t be unbelievable. The hero just wouldn’t be the well-oiled, expertly choreographed killing machine that Wick is/was in that first movie.
Thinking about an older John Wick, fully retired and not even considering having to fight again, might have fit Willis at that stage of his career. One of my precious few knocks against the John Wick series – and really, any story that takes this approach – is that Keanu Reeves is so efficient at killing baddies, there’s hardly any doubt that he’s going to survive, no matter how stacked the adversaries are against him. An older Willis, struggling to match the firepower and man-power of the criminal forces against him, would enhance the error of the decision this man might have made when choosing to embark on a vengeance mission. We get why he had to do it. They killed the last connection he had to his true love. But maybe heading into that mission was a bad idea, solely because of his advanced age?
There is one specific aspect of the story where I personally think that Bruce Willis could have improved on the overall approach to John Wick over Keanu Reeves. I think Willis would have brought more emphasis on the inherent sadness that should fuel Wick through his mission. There’s profound loss coloring John Wick – for the dog, of course, but also for his wife, and for the life they chose outside of the violence that now consumes him. Reeves is a concentrated force, and we get goosebumps when he defiantly tells his opponents that he thinks he’s back. But Willis was always more of an emotional performer, especially in the action genre, and his relatability brought nuance to his gun-toting roles. I can’t relate to the skilled assassin that is John Wick. In Willis’ hands, I might have been able to, on some basic level.
Alas, John Wick was not meant to be one of the best Bruce Willis movies. Instead, Keanu Reeves gets to carry that torch. Will we get a John Wick 5? We’ll keep waiting for updates, as we anticipate Ballerina bringing us back into that blood-soaked world.