Tom Sheridan’s review published on Letterboxd:
It seems Drive was kind of a watershed moment.
John Wick is a film notably from the post drive world. Here it manifests, as it so often does, in vibrant neon and visuals that dive entirely into abstract compositions that plant its subjects in the frame as if they are frozen in painting in a way that seems remarkably static, which in turn makes the sudden shifts into brutal violence all the more jarring.
In addition, there are the remarkably level overhead shots of the city at night that seem to travel at the speed of cars thousands of feet below as if even in its soaring visual space it remains anchored to ground. New York is substituted for Los Angeles, but it marks John Wick pretty conclusively as a post-2011 film.
Which, of course, isn't to call it an ape of Drive (it ain't, the focus squarely on the action in highly choreographed fight sequences much more closely tied to Asian hand to hand combat action films than the chaotic and unsettlingly brief explosions of gruesome gore that mark Refn's film). But rather, the cinematic touchstones of Drive seem to have rewritten the game to such an extant that the R-rated action film particularly is locked into a world where it's influence looms far overhead.