This is 2014 in immature, animal-worshiping, Cute Emergency-retweeting America. You come at a puppy, you best not miss its owner, whose mystique as one of the most ruthless killers ever to wear Kevlar is quickly established in the following exchange between the owner of a chop shop (John Leguizamo) and Iosef's father, Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist):

Viggo: I heard you struck my son. May I ask why?

Aureilo: Because he stole John Wick's car and killed his dog.

Viggo: Oh.

Iosef doesn't just kill John Wick's dog, as Wick expresses in possibly the fiercest monologue Reeves has ever delivered: He kills his hope, and in doing so, unleashes the full fury of a now footloose and fancy-free angel of death. John Wick kills, by my count, 78 people in the movie's 93 minutes, and he doesn't just kill them, he toys with them first like a cat with a mouse, delivering a stray bullet in the shoulder or a kick to the kneecap before offing his targets with two shots to the head, assassination-style. The movie's tagline is "Don't Set Him Off," but it really should be "This Idiot Killed My Puppy and Now Everyone Must Die."

If a movie about a man who kills everyone he sees because his dog dies sounds maybe a trifle flimsy, directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski compensate by creating an elaborate and intriguing universe for Wick—one in which the world's hitmen stay at the same New York City establishment, the Continental. (It's a bit like the Yale Club, only for professional killers.) Nyqvist's Viggo is an old-fashioned, DC-type villain who hoards cash and dirt on all the city's notable figures in his safe house inside a church, and drinks 18-year-old Glenlivet out of a brandy snifter (in case there were any doubt that he’s truly a monster). Wick tracks down Iosef with the help of the Continental's boss (Ian McShane, oozing bonhomie and menace in equal parts), and pays for everything with a stash of gold coins recently liberated from underneath the cement in his garage.

John Wick, in fact, feels so well-established as a character that it's hard to believe this is his debut; that he hasn't been killing people on-screen with poised abandon for decades. Reeves's ability to hint at multitudes while his features remain relatively blank hasn't lessened since the Matrix trilogy, and although now firmly ensconced in middle age, he looks about a decade younger, both in appearance, and in the way he manipulates his way through a kind of weaponized kung fu. He's supported by a broad range of brilliant and underused actors including Willem Dafoe as a mysterious friend, McShane Nyqvist—apparently channeling a Slavic interpretation of the most interesting man in the world—and The Wire alums Lance Reddick (as a hotel manager with an improbable African accent) and Clarke Peters (as a hitman who's unlucky enough to be in the room next door to Wick).