Keanu Reeves’ iconic titular hitman in the John Wick franchise is notoriously a man of few words. In fact, in his most recent outing, he let his guns, knives, and nunchucks do the majority of the talking, and delivered an astonishingly low word-count of dialogue for a nearly-three hour movie, in which he is the main character.
The grand total of words Reeves’ character speaks in John Wick: Chapter 4 is 380 words across 103 lines of dialogue, averaging four words per line. In contrast, during the first film, which is almost half the length of Chapter 4, Baba Yaga is comparatively a chatterbox – delivering 484 words, according to some enlightening findings from The Wall Street Journal.
If that factoid isn’t entertaining enough, how about Reeves himself consciously trimming down his character’s dialogue in the film, which resulted in the elimination of roughly half of the words Wick spoke in the initial script? John Wick: Chapter 4 writer Michael Finch quipped of Reeves to WSJ that “It’s a shock when you work with him how dedicated he is to not speaking.”
The wordiest line of dialogue Wick delivers in the film is in to his longtime friends and Osaka Continental Manager Shimazi Koji, and is a single sentence – “You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend.” The rest of his dialogue is a series of much shorter liners, or simply the delivery of his iconic grownling “Yeah.”
Perhaps one of the chattiest moments for Wick in the entire film is the scene in which he sits down for a tense card game with Killa, Caine, and The Tracker. The star who brought life to the latter of those three, Scott Adkins, recently mused on how he didn’t mind being entirely unrecognizable in the film.