A new feature piece in The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Keanu Reeves’ John Wick character, already not much of a talker in the first film, barely has any dialogue in the new movie.
The paper says Reeves utters only 380 words across 103 lines of dialogue during the 169-minute runtime of “John Wick: Chapter 4” – averaging at 2.25 words per minute. Nearly a third of Reeves’ dialogue in the sequel consists of repeating one word.
To put that in comparison, the first film had Reeves saying a total of 484 words across 101 minutes. The fourth film’s trailer features about 10% of Keanu’s dialogue from the film – with the character saying more in that clip than he does in the film’s first 25 minutes.
The film’s co-screenwriter Michael Finch says it’s by design, as Reeves and director Chad Stahelski removed “roughly half the dialogue written for his character in the initial script”.
The scene in which Wick and the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) hash out the rules of their duel was originally scripted, with Wick having 50% of the dialogue in the scene.
In the final film, Reeves cut out big chunks of dialogue and limited Wick to a handful of one-word responses like ‘pistol’.
His single longest line in the film is “You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend”, which he says to his friend Osaka Continental Hotel manager Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada).
“John Wick: Chapter 4” is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
