265 Running Head OUT OF TIME AND GOING SIDEWAYS JOHN WICK, TIME TRAVELER Charles M. Tung 10 John Wick is out of time. At the start of John Wick: Chapter 3—Para- bellum, because Wick has killed a High Table member “on company grounds” and broken the rules about the inviolable space of the Con- tinental Hotel, the hotel manager, Winston, gives him just one hour before all resources from this posh criminal underworld are cut of and the contracts on his life begin. But audiences of the John Wick flms have noticed that Wick is out of time in other ways. Te entire criminal estab- lishment revolving around the Continental appears to be “constitutively out of time,” as the critic Robert Barry puts it: its anachronistic object world is steeped in a “kind of old world glamour . . . that comes in luxury hotels with oak paneled walls, marble foors, and gilt fligree.”1 In addi- tion to the stylish “timelessness” communicated by the flms’ set design, fans have enjoyed imagining the Wick flms as the most recent episodes in an autobiographical flmography of an immortal, time-traveling Keanu Reeves: strewn among press photos of an apparently ageless ac- tor, one might also fnd Parmigianino’s 1530 portrait of Keanu posing as an Italian nobleman (Portrait of a Man ), Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s 1875 painting of Keanu hiding as a French medical student (Paul Mounet ), and ad slicks from Keanu’s surprisingly self-referential Bill and Ted flms of 1989 and 1991.2 Keanu Reeves is the time traveler you send to play the fucking time traveler. Finally, in more intricate fan Worlds of John Wick.indd 265 Worlds of John Wick.indd 265 12/3/21 3:00 PM 12/3/21 3:00 PM Buy this book for your university library ! The Worlds of John Wick: The Year's Work at the Continental Hotel. Edited by Caitlin G. Watt and Stephen Watt. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2022. These are unedited proofs of chapter 10.