John Wick’s Will to Power: A Pop Introduction to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Philosophy of Transcendental Maximalism

“Anyone can start again

Not through love but through revenge

Through the fire, we’re born again

Peace by vengeance brings the end”

— Lana Del Rey

In my forthcoming book Artificial Will, I refer to my philosophy by the name of transcendental maximalism. I develop this based on a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s infamous but often misunderstood doctrine of “the will to power.” In rapid-fire bullet points, the basic idea is that any intelligent agent or system can only pursue whatever ends they might have through certain universal means. These means are intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness—or what Nietzsche often just calls “power.” Seeing as any intelligent agent or system can only pursue their ends by first pursuing these means of realizing them, they all have those means intrinsically preprogrammed into them as their most fundamental drives. According to this reconstruction, then, the will to power marks the means-ends reversal by which intelligence, creativity, and resource maxxing—that we traditionally treat as an instrumental means to supposedly more important ends of our choosing—is transvaluated as an ultimate end in itself with its own intrinsic worth. Transcendental maximalism is all about exploring the consequences of what happens when the means become the ends.

I have spoken about transcendental maximalism in these philosophical terms elsewhere, such as in my Hermitix podcast interview and in my course on Nietzsche’s will to power. I have also written about it in brief for a chapter in Machine Decision is Not Final (forthcoming with Urbanomic) and in much greater detail in my book Artificial Will, coming soon to a future near you. In this essay, I want to instead see if there is a kind of pop culture mascot, a characterization almost cartoonish in its simplicity, which could nonetheless act as the official spokesperson for transcendental maximalism. With the recent release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025), a spinoff to the popular action film franchise, I am reminded that the best candidate for this mascot is none other than Mr. Wick.

The film John Wick (2014) opens as the titular anti-hero (played by Keanu Reeves) is grieving his wife’s death with the help of a puppy she gave him. A few days later, some Russian gangsters at a gas station try and fail to intimidate him into selling his car. That night, they break into his home, beat him up, shoot his puppy dead, and steal the car. The father of one of the thugs, Viggo Tarasov, then reveals to his great dismay that John was once a renowned and feared assassin. After Viggo gave him a seemingly “impossible task” to earn his retirement, John miraculously succeeded and was set free of all bonds.

I will not dwell on this basic premise any further because none of it really matters when it comes to enjoying and grappling with the film. For it is not long before John digs up a cache of his old guns and goes on a murderous rampage of revenge, mowing down wave after wave of NPC hitmen like a sleep deprived and antisocial video game addict grinding for XP. The John Wick films have been widely praised for showcasing some of the most spectacular and inventive action set pieces in the history of cinema through their polydrug cocktails of mixed martial arts and gun fu, real stunts and CGI, elaborate and artful set design and heart racing electronic soundtracks. But they have also been criticized for their paper-thin narratives that serve merely as an excuse for stitching together one violent and bloody action sequence after another.

On first impressions, this line of criticism appears to be justified given that the initial catalyst for all the ensuing mayhem is the murder of John’s pet puppy. This can seem like an absurdly weak character motivation way out of proportion to his relentless and brutal quest for revenge. Behind the scenes, this was a particular point of contention as some of the filmmakers believed a dead dog couldn’t plausibly justify the piles of bodies stacked up in response. As the crime boss Viggo puts it in the film, “it was just a fucking car, just a fucking dog.” While one might assume that the puppy is imbued with special significance because it was given to John by his wife, he doesn’t even bother to name “it.” Moreover, given how little human life matters in John’s assassin underworld, it is hardly convincing that a dog’s life would mean much either.

Contra this line of criticism, however, I would suggest that John’s apparent overreaction betrays all the telltale signs of a transcendental maximalist. It evinces that John’s endgame is not actually to avenge his slain pup, with all the action serving as a mere means to advance this quest. On the contrary, the real endgame is just the action itself, with the flimsy revenge plot providing a pretext for staging ever more ingenious, creative and resourceful fight scenes. That the whole bloodbath started because some mobsters murdered John’s dog does not betray a poorly developed character motivation. It rather reveals that such petty goals as revenge are just a trigger for inciting the action for action’s sake. As Viggo’s brother explains in John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), it was never really about John reaping revenge so much as exercising his insatiable will (to power):

“He killed my nephew, my brother, a dozen of my men over his car and a puppy. You think he will stop now?”

“Sir, he’s one man. Why don’t we just eliminate him?”

“John Wick is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer fucking will.”

If John comes across at times as if he doesn’t even know what he is really fighting for, it is because the fighting is an ultimate end in itself.

We also find this means-ends reversal behind the elaborate rules and codes of the criminal underworld, which the assassins adhere to as meticulously as they aim down the barrel of their snipers. In John Wick: Chapter 2, another crime boss, Santino D’Antonio, presents John with a medallion marker representing a blood oath. After John refuses to fulfil his debt, Santino destroys his house with a rocket launcher, Lana Del Rey style. Once again, John seeks revenge. As more of the underworld’s fastidiously followed rules are revealed throughout his revenge quest and in the later films, they cannot but come across as rather contingent and arbitrary. In John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum (2019), for instance, there is a scene in which John and another assassin are fighting each other to the death only for John to place his hand on the footpath outside the Continental, a luxury hotel that acts as a neutral territory where no criminal business may be conducted. Going from mortal enemies to practically BFFs in a hot second, the two of them proceed to have a drink at the bar together, with the other assassin fanboying out: “I gotta tell you, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. I’m a huge fan, John Wick, and so far you haven’t disappointed.”

Here as with John’s puppy payback narrative, the rules are not really the ironclad law of the assassins’ land, with the action serving simply to execute them. The rules are rather an arbitrary excuse to provoke the assassins’ more fundamental fealty to choreographing ever more cunning and inventive fights. As Santino tellingly says, our paradoxically Zenlike adrenaline junkie doesn’t want revenge so much as he wants the seeking out of revenge itself so that there can never really be an end to the bloodshed: “killing me won’t stop the contract. Killing me will make it so much worse. John, you know what I think? I think you’re addicted to it. To the vengeance. No wife. No life. No home. Vengeance. It’s all you have.” Or as The Elder of the underworld tells John in the third film, “never seen a man fight so hard to end up back where he started.”

The best demonstration of this means-ends reversal is a scene from John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum when two hitmen manage to knock John to the floor. Although they could easily kill him as he lays there injured and unarmed—and thereby collect the bounty on his head—they instead put their knives away and offer him a helping hand, adding: “it’s an honor to fight with you, Mr. Wick.” The three of them proceed to fight each other some more until John is again knocked to the ground only for his sparring partners to help him to his feet once more. Rather imaginatively wielding his pants belt to beat them senseless, John finally walks away third time lucky with the parting words: “see you later.” The key takeaway here is that this scene only makes sense if the assassins’ true goal is not to win the fight and collect the reward but to cultivate the fighting itself in increasingly intricate choreographies. As another contract killer says after John impales him with a sword, “hey John, that was a pretty good fight huh?,” to which our man of few words responds, “yeah.”

If the point is not to progress the plot by means of the action but to maximize the high-octane thrills and spectacular set pieces for their own sake, then each subsequent John Wick film has certainly served and has been of service in upping the ante over the previous instalment. In the first film set entirely in New York, there is basically one long fight scene in a nightclub along with a bunch of smaller skirmishes involving mostly hand-to-hand combat and guns. In John Wick: Chapter 2 set in New York and Rome, there are more elaborate action sequences at a smuggling compound, a roman amphitheater and the catacombs underneath, and an art museum, with not only fists and guns but also cars, motorbikes, and even a pencil. In John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum set in New York and Casablanca, the action mostly takes place in the New York Public Library, a kasbah, and the Continental hotel, with a book, antique guns, knives, and axes, motorbikes, attack dogs, swords, and even a horse’s kicks and John’s pants belt all being a part of his arsenal. In John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) set in Casablanca, New York, Osaka, Berlin, and Paris, John fights it out in the Moroccan desert, the Osaka Continental, the Berghain nightclub, the Champs-Élysées, an abandoned Parisian manor, and the Rue Foyatier staircase leading up to Sacré-Cœur, with fists, guns, swords, nunchucks, axes, cars, a flare gun, and even playing cards and a blind assassin’s cane.

Whether it’s the way John goes full object-oriented ontologist reinventing everyday objects like pencils or books into deadly weapons or the increasingly complex choreography and scaled up set pieces, each film delights in outdoing the previous entry in ever greater displays of cunning, creativity, and resourcefulness. The only thing that seems to decrease in direct proportion to the action ramping up is John’s dialogue and any hint of narrative along with it. Already in the first film, a conversation between our laconic anti-hero and a priest that amounted to five pages in the script was trimmed down in the final cut to John simply responding: “uh huh.” Crunching the numbers bears this out, too: each film has had a bigger budget, longer run time, and seemingly larger kill count while almost doubling the previous instalment at the box office and mogging it in critical acclaim. Not bad for Chad Stahelski’s directorial debut after having worked as Reeves’ stuntman and the martial arts coordinator on the original Matrix trilogy. With the John Wick franchise having promoted the stuntman to the director of the whole bloody affair, it’s not so surprising that we see the action take precedence over and above any thin veneer of a plot.

As each new film surpasses its predecessor in leveling up the action, scale, and sheer thrills, the fight with the highest kill count is naturally the last one in John Wick: Chapter 4 where our cool cat assassin with nine lives fights his way up the Rue Foyatier steps to Sacré-Cœur only to be knocked down to the bottom and have to do it all over again, the second time with some added help from his killer friends. That this long journey to the destination is repeated and yet proves to be far more memorable than the ending at the summit just goes to show that John Wick is the transcendental maximalist mascot par excellence as he prioritizes the action over the plot or the means above the ends. As the last film’s final boss pithily puts it when he is told that “the bloodshed in Osaka was unnecessary” to achieve his purported aims, “the bloodshed was the point.”