So there’s a scene in John Wick 4 where my wife was like “Oh, they’re lifting this from The Warriors,” and when I looked completely blank, she insisted that I watch it. So we did an impromptu double feature.

It’s… a weird movie. The basic setup is that it’s New York City in the ’70s (or maybe one of those “near future dystopias”? It’s hard to tell, because ‘70s NYC is already basically dystopian to start with), and the city is overrun with competing gangs.

But… they’re silly gangs. All the gangs wear matching clothes, and the gang with purple satin jackets isn’t by far the most ridiculous of them — that would probably be the mimes or the baseball clowns (both complete with painted faces). And when they do encounter each other, they face off in a way that makes the Sharks and Jets look like super-tough badasses.

It sort of feels like this is intentional, like the movie is trying to say that look, all these threatening gangs are really just boys who aren’t as tough as they look. But then, if that’s what you’re trying to do, wouldn’t you… make them look tough in the first place? I just don’t know.

Anyway, with that setup in place, the story of the movie is that the titular gang (whose regalia is maroon leather vests with their logo printed on the back, very classy) is being framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and all the other gangs are after them while they try to make their way home. So it’s mostly just a bunch of disconnected episodes of them trying to get past cops, rival gangs, subway accidents, whatever, on their way home.

The episodes are weird individually: There’s one where they encounter a gang of “wimps” and basically scare them all away with almost no violence, and one of the wimp gang’s girls voluntarily goes with them (despite their repeated threats of sexual violence!) for no obvious reason. There’s a scene where one of the gang members (who, remember, are our protagonists) begins to sexually assault a woman who turns out to be a police officer and is arrested. Another gang member gets into a tussle with a cop, and… I think he’s hit by a train? But the movie basically never mentions it again and it’s shot confusingly, so maybe not.

And I guess that weirdness is what makes it interesting: If this were just a mundane, realistic portrait of ’70s NYC gang life, it would likely feel dated and boring at this point. But this absurd fantasia of a long and perilous journey home has a kind of heightened, almost mythic (reviews keep mentioning Xenophon’s Anabasis, which I’m not familiar with, but The Odyssey is what came to my mind) feel to it that makes it more interesting than mere reality. I don’t think this is a good movie, exactly, but it’s not a boring one, and that counts for something in my book.

(Oh, and as for the reference in John Wick: Yeah, the radio DJ bit is a direct rip of this, at a level so blatant that I believe the correct word is “homage,” as it’s obviously intended to be noticed.)