This may or may not shock to learn, but Oliver Stone (JFK, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday) isn’t the biggest fan of blockbuster movies these days. In fact, Oliver Stone has recently gone on the record to say that John Wick: Chapter 4 is “disgusting beyond belief,” and that Marvel movies are not “believable.”
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“I saw John Wick 4 on the plane. Talk about volume. I think the film is disgusting beyond belief. Disgusting,” Stone said during a recent interview with Variety. “I don’t know what people are thinking. Maybe I was watching G.I. Joe when I was a kid. But [Keanu Reeves] kills, what, three, four hundred people in the fucking movie. And as a combat veteran, I gotta tell you, not one of them is believable. I realize it’s a movie, but it’s become a video game more than a movie. It’s lost touch with reality.
“The audience perhaps likes the video game. But I get bored by it,” Stone added. “How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What’s the difference between ‘Fast and Furious’ and some other film? It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s a super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable.”
It’s somewhat ironic to hear Oliver Stone commenting on the reality of violence in movies. The filmmaker earned his acclaim writing the scripts for movies like Conan the Barbarian and Scarface, before moving on to directing films like Platoon, Natural Born Killers, and Savages. Whatever Stone may try to argue about the John Wick films, it’s highly debatable whether or not his films have exposed violence in its savagery and horror, or simply stylized it in ways that made the saturation of hyper-realistic violence more prevalent in society. After all, Stone is the man who made serial killers (Natural Born Killers’s Mickey and Mallory) into cultural rockstar icons of the 1990s.
There’s also the irony of the John Wick series being a particularly unique showcase of Hollywood”s stunt actor talent. The series was created by Derek Kolstad, one of the biggest action-genre talents of today, while the films were directed by Chad Stahelski, one of the most tenured stuntmen in Hollywood, going back to 1994 when he was the stunt double for Brandon Lee in The Crow. In his time as a director, Stahelski has made films that have employed and fed hundreds of stunt actors, and crew people – meaning Stahelsk has, in fact, helped open new lanes for his fellow stunt creatives that led to box office success and franchise sustainability.
Meanwhile, Oliver Stone hasn’t exactly lit the box office on fire in years or thrilled the Twitterverse with his social views. His current documentary film, Nuclear Now is no different, as it makes the case for an increase in nuclear power production being a major solution to Earth’s Climate Change woes.
