Reeves, an actor who even at his most stoic can’t hide his innate likability, was warmer than the role called for - and that’s just what made it connect.

What no one could have anticipated is how well the counterintuitive casting worked. Yes, he’d proved his action combat bona fides in the “Matrix” films, but Wick, the former underworld assassin who can’t seem to cut ties with the series’ fanciful, cult-like, Mob-as-Illuminati hierarchy, was a cutthroat desperado with the taste of sadism in his blood. “John Wick,” in 2014, was a sleeper hit - an attempt to revive Reeves’ career with the last sort of role you would have expected him to play. These days, every franchise seems to get mapped out in advance on a corporate balance sheet, but the “John Wick” movies are the rare series that discovered what it was as it went along. His reflexes are as fast as his soul is dark. Wick, like Bruce Lee or the heroes of the great Hong Kong action films, never knows what’s coming at him from around the next corner and is always ready to meet it.

Shot in long takes, the action flows enough to earn the term “balletic,” but it’s also vicious enough to be existential. The hand-to-hand combat in a “John Wick” film is at once relentless and tantalizing in its down-and-dirty realism. So will the army of henchmen who are inevitably there to confront Wick, and who will be mowed down like Grand Theft Auto fodder.

Wick faces a corpulent foe in gold gangsta teeth and a lavender suit who sucks on an inhaler with the relish of Dennis Hopper in “Blue Velvet.” He will, of course, get what’s coming to him. It’s built around guns, knives, fists and pure will: anything that can inflict instant death.

Signal 23 climax