John Wick is anything but subtle, hammering at your senses with almost continuous, high-octane action. The first fifteen minutes introduce its eponymous protagonist (Keanu Reeves) and set up the story – in short, John Wick is an ex-hitman who gets drawn back into the criminal underworld to get revenge after his dog is killed by Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the son of a mob boss. Once that’s out of the way, director Chad Stahelski jumps straight into the action, ramping the film’s pacing as high as it can go and more or less maintaining the same intensity for the next hour and a half.

Managing to combine stylishness with efficiency in the film as a whole, and gritty realism with outrageous fun in the action sequences, Stahelski has created something that is effortlessly entertaining. John Wick will grab you and hold your gaze with a torrent of fantastic action sequences, all strung together by brief flashes of humour and a pumping, energetic score.

The acting is solid throughout, with Reeves’ characteristic detachment working well in a film so obviously focused on fitting as many action set-pieces in an hour and a half as possible. It is Alfie Allen who shines, however, stealing all the scenes with a swaggering self-confidence and capitalising on any and all opportunities to make his character as dislikeable as possible.

The problem with the film, though, is its focus on including as much action as possible, which extends so far as to exclude pretty much anything else. The story is simplistic to the extreme; everything is stripped to a kind of barebones state, leaving no opportunity for any real characterisation, which runs the risk of there being no engagement with the characters or the events which unfold on the screen.

If the action weren’t so well-crafted (almost to the point of flawlessness), the lack of story or characterisation here would ruin the film. But that doesn’t happen – the film is engaging and it achieves exactly what it set out to achieve. Had there been a bit more to it, John Wick could have been a masterpiece; what it is instead is an excellent action flick, and one of the most fun films to be released this year so far.

John Wick (2014), directed by Chad Stahelski, is distributed in the UK by Summit Entertainment, Certificate 15.