In the deceptively thoughtful 2014 action film John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a recently widowed assassin who comes out of retirement after Russian gangsters beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog. Miffed about the car, not too happy about the beating, but furious about the demise of his puppy, Wick goes on a murderous rampage and ends up killing 3,625 people, all of whom deserve it.
Motion pictures often provide subtle, impossibly delicate critiques of society that go over the head of the average moviegoer. This is particularly true in the macroeconomic arena, where films address flaws in popular economic theories, such as the misguided notion that low unemployment is a good thing. For in John Wick, we see exactly what happens when an economy reaches full employment: A hapless employer seeking high-quality personnel finds that all the good ones are taken, all the pros have full-time jobs, and the only people left to hire as henchmen are the halt and the lame, the bottom of the barrel, the dregs of society, the duds.
Not to take anything away from Wick qua bloodthirsty, conscienceless assassin, but if a minuscule labor pool had not forced the Russkie mob boss to hire wastrels, half-wits, and temps to protect him, there is no way his nemesis could have killed off 3,625 of his henchscum. He might have iced 1,000. Maybe 2,000. But he couldn’t have killed all of them, because if unemployment were still running at, say, 5.5 percent, there would still have been a few reasonably competent thugs on the payroll who could put Wick in the ground. The fact is, most of the gangsters in John Wick look like they have day jobs at Applebee’s.
The exact same thing happens in John Wick 2, only this time Keanu polishes off one-third of the population of Rome in about 18 minutes. It is a stupendous achievement, all the more so because this time Wick is not shooting hundreds of people in the head for personal reasons, but because he owes a colleague a favor. In the topsy-turvy, yet oddly honorable, world of John Wick, when a pal asks you to kill 125,978 people, including his sister, and to do it gratis, you do it.
Yet here, as with the original John Wick, an intriguing economic subtext can be deciphered. After Wick shoots or stabs 112,534 bad people, the guy who hired him dispatches his own crew to ice the prolific hit man. This works out badly, as Wick not only kills the 15,768 thugs sent to do him in, but guns down his old backstabbing compadre himself.
Alas, in a momentary lapse of reason, he guns him down in an exclusive hotel that caters only to gangsters, and here such indecorous behavior is strictly forbidden. Immediately, a global contract is put out on him, a contract so mind-bogglingly vast, constituting such an unimaginably large sum of money, that no one can resist gunning for him. It is a contract for $7 million.
Seven million dollars? Seriously? A piddling $7 million to kill the most gifted, remorseless killer the world has ever known? Let’s face it, $7 million just isn’t a whole lot of cash, not when you consider the risk-reward ratio.
What will $7 million get you outside the world of homicide? Look at it this way: Chase Daniel, backup quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, gets $7 million a year. Last year, he threw one pass. One pass. The entire season. In other words, $7 million will get you a scrub who rides the bench behind a callow rookie. What else will $7 million get you? It might get you a tiny summer home in the Hamptons. You might get Barbra Streisand to do a one-night-only engagement at your private stadium. But she probably wouldn’t do an encore. What $7 million will not get you is an actor of the stature of Keanu Reeves to star in your movie. Ironically, Keanu the actor gets more money to act in John Wick 2 than an assassin would get to kill him.
Where did that number come from? Why not $10 million? Or $20 million? Or since the price on Wick’s head is Monopoly money, why not offer a trillion? In the first John Wick, Keanu kills 3,625 villains. In the second, he kills 1.2 million. And that’s just in Rome. So if I’m a top-flight button man and somebody asks me to off a killer of his pedigree, I’m going to want a whole lot more than $7 million.
The question is: Has Hollywood screwed up the numbers here? No. Because as Wick’s bloodbath continues, he dispatches everyone sent to kill him. So by the time the film is over, another 125,387 corpses have been added to the funeral pyre.
What do we learn from this? Simple. When the labor market contracts, employers have no choice but to hike salaries to attract quality help. During a recession, you might be able to hire a halfway-decent hit man for $7 million. But once the economy starts to percolate, $7 million will get you nothing but clowns, has-beens, amateurs. As the final shot in John Wick 2 fades out, we see Keanu pursued by an army of cash-strapped hit men, none of whom has a chance of finishing him off.
Mark my words: When John Wick 3 hits the screen in a year or so, the price on Keanu Reeves’s head is going to go straight through the roof. At least $100 million. Plus benefits. Because as anybody in show business, and the world of economics, will tell you: You want talent? Pay for it.
Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of One for the Books.
