The highly enjoyable fourth instalment in the John Wick franchise was indeed a long movie, by Hollywood standards. It has 169-minute runtime, most of which is one brilliant piece of action sequence after another.
However, the lead character, the eponymous John Wick doesn't say much during the movie, even as he takes out armies of assassins with guns, including dragon's breath shells, knives, a nunchaku, and of course bare hands.
The Wall Street Journal counted the number of words and sentences Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, utters in the movie. He spoke just 380 words across 103 lines in the entire runtime. John Wick indeed is a man of few words.
In contrast, he had said a total of 484 words in the first John Wick movie, which had a runtime of mere 101 minutes, according to the publication.
Reeves reportedly cut major portions of his dialogues for the scene where Wick and Marquis de Gramon were framing the rules for the final gun duel. “It’s a shock when you work with him how dedicated he is to not speaking,” co-writer of the movie Michael Finch has been quoted as saying.
His longest dialogue in the movie has 14 words—“You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend.” Most of his dialogues in the movie are monosyllables like “Yeah.”
John Wick: Chapter 4 was released in Indian theatres on March 24. Shot in New York, Osaka, Berlin and Paris, the film also stars Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama, and Lance Reddick, who passed away recently at the age of 60.