The story of how Bob Odenkirk became an action star begins, of course, with John Wick. The 2014 film was positioned as a comeback for Keanu Reeves, whose star had been tarnished by invisible indies and outright failures like 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still remake and an expensive fantasy take on the 47 ronin in 2013. A sleeper hit, John Wick owed its success to Reeves’s persuasion with a global audience – soon to become legendary – and a shift behind the scenes with industry-wide implications. Beginning life as a spec script by relative newcomer Derek Kolstad, “Scorn” was reconfigured as Reeves’s “John Wick movie” by directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, two veteran stunt coordinators. These were guys from the trenches of the action genre, with Stahelski having doubled Reeves on The Matrix – as well as being Brandon Lee’s stand-in on The Crow – and directing second-unit on blockbusters like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Even after the release of John Wick, he and Leitch returned to their day gig for the set pieces on Captain America: Civil War. A nice paycheck, perhaps, but this old way of doing things was coming to an end. … More A Couple of Nobodies