For some now, I’ve had the impression that something about the John Wick movies is profoundly religious, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The imagery? The rituals? The “immoral order” of their universe? Maybe the dictum “Rules: without them, we live with the animals” is, in some sense, an attempt to transcend our baser, animalistic instincts. Whatever it is, I couldn’t put it into words. However, there is a far more obvious theme in these movies, one which is hinted at in the second and made explicit in the last. (In case you haven’t seen the last one yet, which only came out on the 24th, then fair warning: spoilers!) I’m speaking of course about the motif of hell. Namely, the recurring question: is John Wick on his path to Heaven or to Hell? He himself was asked if he worried about damnation in the second movie, to which he said yes. This was only in one exchange, however. In the fourth movie, this question is undoubtedly brought to the fore, even from the opening scene when you hear Laurence Fishburne’s booming voice quote from Dante:

Through me you pass into the city of woe: / Through me you pass into eternal pain. … / Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure. / “All hope abandon ye who enter here.”

Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3

Is this John’s fate?

That John Wick is a killer is obvious. Less obvious, however, is the harm his actions afflict indirectly. Early on we’re shown some of the consequences of the actions of others that were themselves only reactions to what John was doing. He vengefulness begat greater ferocity in return, which resulted in many deaths—and that’s to say nothing of deaths that John himself was responsible for.

However, we see his remorseful side, that isn’t proud of the life he’s led. He admits to Caine that he believes he’s damned. Yet, these are words he utters in a church, which begs the question: how far from God is this man really? Perhaps quite far if one only regards his actions, but where does his heart truly lie? Rather uncharacteristically, John’s last words are not words of vengeance: his last word was “Helen,” his wife’s name. His last thought is of time spent with her. That he wanted “loving husband” as his epitaph gives me some glimmer of hope that, at his core, John Wick isn’t just a killer. That his soul is salvageable.

When I think about the world John Wick grew up in, needless to say I don’t imagine it a pretty sight. It seems that he was, in many ways, by the force of circumstance, born into this sort of life. He did, however, attain freedom having met his wife. And then, upon losing her, and having endured an awful grief, he falls back in. The question, therefore, isn’t whether he’s savable. The question is whether his falling back into the life has damned him. This would be like if, in the parable of the prodigal son, the son were to leave home again after having returned one time already.

The movie itself is ambiguous on this point, leaving it to the viewer to determine the answer for themself. Was Wick the prodigal son not once, but twice? I have my own opinion, as you may have guessed. And I think—or rather, I hope—that he was. There’s a reason the church has never definitively taught that any particular soul is in Hell. As Dante’s prologue to Hell would indicate, Hell is about the worst fate anyone could merit. As such, it is perhaps best not to make such a severe judgement too hastily.

The way I choose to look at it is this: was he a better man at the end of his life than he was from the first? That he seemed to exhibit a kind of remorseful conscience, I gather that, in a complicated way, he was. Thus, not wishing to think of him as by any means saintly, I hope for him since one thing is certain: if he were on his way to Heaven, he would need purgatory, though I suspect he’d rise to the occasion. Those 200-something steps he took to Sacré Coeur Cathedral in Paris reflect for him, in some ways, Dante’s mountain in purgatorio. Only this time around, it would not be his own “focus, committment, and sheer fucking will” that gets him to the top. As he learned his last time around, he would need to depend upon others for his salvation, but rather, as the prayerful words before his death made clear, he ought to and must “commend” his soul to God.

While John Wick is only a story, it is an intriguing one; and it is in that context that I hope, very much so, that he found peace, not by his own efforts, but by God’s. (That is, of course, working from the assumption that he actually died in the fourth movie. Some people have flirted with the idea that he might be hiding out somewhere Bruce Wayne-style.)