Santino D'Antonio is an Idiot

Last weekend was fantastic! However, my TV decided to die for no discernible reason, so I might be a bit behind on watching things. That, and also giving up PS4 for Lent, means I’m not playing anything, but in the game news sphere we found out recently that Pentiment will be on Playstation and PC, and that the original Battlefront and Battlefront II were getting remasters coming out! Hooray!

Currently, I am reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and enjoying it more than I expected.

This Note takes some inspiration, in spirit at least, from this ACOUP post (which I think I’ve linked to here before). Next week, I think we’re going to try talking about magic in the MCU.

Anyway, let’s talk about John Wick.

Santino D’Antonio is an Idiot

So I recently rewatched John Wick: Chapter 2.

[Spoiler warning! This Saturday Note contains spoilers for the first two John Wick movies!]

To recap: After the end of the first film, in which John Wick kills a large chunk of the Russian mob and gets a new dog, he goes back home to chillax. But ohes noes! Santino D’Antonio appears on his doorstep carrying a marker, a signal for a blood oath. See, to complete an impossible task to retire the first time, John made a deal with Santino and owes him a favor. Santino left him alone as long as he was retired, but since he was apparently back to shooting people, he demands John fulfill his end of the bargain. John refuses, Santino burns his house down, and so he eventually decides that he better fulfill his end of the bargain.

Santino, as it turns out, wants John Wick to kill his sister, Gianna. Their father was head of the Camorra, and held a seat at the High Table (the organization that apparently runs all crime in the world, and may or may not be a modern continuation of the Hashshashin); when he died, he passed those titles to Gianna. Santino wants them instead. When John completes the task, Santino immediately has his goon squad try to kill John in one of the escape tunnels; officially, because he “must avenge his sister’s murder”, in reality, to tie up loose ends and presumably prevent John from telling people who ordered him to kill Gianna D’Antonio.

Now, when I say, “Santino’s an idiot,” you’re probably thinking something like, “Well, duh, he tried to backstab John Wick, the man known for making mob mooks drop like potatoes in a spud storm.” And that is true! More directly though, I mean that if he really wanted John dead, Santino should have chosen a better approach than throwing thugs at him. He could have had that tunnel booby-trapped. He could have had him sniped from a rooftop as he made his way back to the Continental. He could have tried meeting with him and poisoning him. And I’m not saying all of these would have been guaranteed to work–they very well might not have. That doesn’t change that they’re smarter decisions than what he went with.

Predictably, John survives, and then decides (even with a bounty on his head) to make his mission to shoot Santino in the face.

This isn’t meant to be a criticism of the movie; if anything, the movie works better because it develops Santino as a villain. Yes, he’s an idiot. But he’s an idiot that other characters recognize as an idiot; or at the very least, incompetent and unnecessarily cruel.

Remember what I said above: when Santino’s father died, he deliberately did not give him control over the crime family or his seat at the High Table. The conversation between John and Gianna also indicates that she agrees that Santino’s a poor fit for the role (and also she seems to feel a little bad that her brother made John kill her, as they used to be friends). Santino spends the entire movie then proving his father and sister correct by squandering his resources trying to clean up a mess he made in the first place. In the end, he ends up hiding in the Continental for sanctuary, as it’s against the rules to kill there… and then rubbing it John’s face while the man has a gun out, not realizing that the man whose life he made unnecessarily difficult would be way too angry to care about the rules. He gets a bullet to the head for his stupidity.

[There’s some speculation on the TV Tropes YMMV page for this movie that maybe this was all some ridiculously complex plan on Santino’s part, but I think that’s giving him too much credit. He’s plainly got more power than sense, and again, his being passed up for the job as head of the Camorra indicates that the straightforward explanation works better.]

I think it’s really cool that we (the audience) are told he didn’t get the job as head honcho on his own, and then the story demonstrates over and over again why that is. You see, villains don’t actually need to be competent. Don’t get me wrong, a good, clever villain can really liven up a story, and there are plenty of examples of incredibly smart antagonists. And it doesn’t do to make your villain a nonsensical idiot. The first book of Iron Druid Chronicles has the main villain render himself impotent in his elaborate revenge plot to get an excuse to kill the protagonist…even though his blood feud has been well-established and he already has good reason to want him dead.

But! Sometimes it’s good to have a villain who isn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the room, because that is what we often see in the real world. Many of the villains we see in history, or heck, on the news, aren’t doing horrible evil deeds because they’re clever. A clever man wouldn’t drag his nation into war for his own ambitions and ego. A clever group wouldn’t assassinate a well-loved politician in public and brag about it. A clever woman wouldn’t forge promissory bank notes of a well-known millionaire when the bank could easily call him up and learn that he didn’t write them.

But these things all happened anyway. Because a lot of times, the really dangerous people aren’t the ones who have it all figured out, they’re the ones who think they do. All of those examples I listed above were by people who weren’t as smart as they think they are, and still caused massive problems.

Same with Santino. He thought he could have his sister assassinated, then kill the assassin, and everything would go fine. He didn’t consider that sending a gang of goons to kill said assassin, or heck, involving John Fricking Wick in the first place, would go badly. John Wick, a man who was frighteningly good at killing people and surviving impossible scenarios, and made it abundantly clear that he wants to be left alone with his dog.

And Santino done ticked him off.

Stupid head.

This is good character development, though! We’re told that a character is unsuitable for something, and then we see the that he’s not through his actions. You’d be surprised how often that doesn’t happen–that a piece of fiction tells us something about a character, and we never see it in action. For instance, anytime you hear a character referred to as a brilliant strategist in a movie or television show, actually pay attention: they’re rarely any good at tactics, and often laughably bad.

Santino D’Antonio was an idiot. And that’s the entire point of his character.

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