The John Wick films are among those “people’s films” beloved by the multitudes. In the weeks leading up to the premiere of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, you could find instant solidarity with tired workers in the elevator and harassed grocery store checkers and the melancholy guy who comes to fix the dryer, just by mentioning that you were looking forward to seeing John Wick 3. It was wonderful to see the faces light up in eager response: “Oh yeah, John Wick! I’ll be there first day — already bought my tickets.”

The first film was directed by relative unknowns, Chad Stahelski and (uncredited) David Leitch, who started out as stunt coordinators and second unit directors on various, generally lowly, action films. “We’d be on like the fourth sequel, or maybe the sixth,” they told the adoring hosts at Honest Movie Trailers. Even with star Keanu Reeves on board, whom they knew from working on The Matrix films (Stahelski was Reeves’s stunt double), John Wick had to be done on a tight budget. Stunt men playing goons shot by John Wick in the first film had to jump up as soon as they were out of camera frame to run around and attack him again, in order to make a small cast of killers look big.

For those who can’t understand why so many people like action films that are all about killing — and John Wick is definitely all about killing — it can be enlightening to consider these movies. They provide all the fantastical escapism you crave after working your dreary job, or jobs, all week, or suffering from needing a job and not having one, and they find a way to connect the fantastical elements of the film’s “world building” to a common core of shared reality. That shared reality between you and John Wick is getting fucked over by people rotten with power in a dirty system that come at you aggressively when you’re just trying to get by in your life, which is already pretty miserable. What little you have, they take from you.