As people who love the John Wick films more than is probably healthy—but seriously, how good is that scene where he fights dudes in the room with like a million knives in it in John Wick: Chapter 3?—we’re sympathetic to the idea of loving Baba Yaga and his various hyper-violent exploits a little too much. Still, there’s “loving John Wick,” and then there’s “Our international drug smuggling concern was potentially brought down because we wanted to slip a cute little reference to John Wick into our cover story,” and one such illicit organization appears to have recently crossed that line.
This is per a Euronews and AP story, covering a drug bust that recently happened in Italy, in which Italian cops discovered a bag filled with coffee beans that had all been cut open, hollowed out, filled with cocaine, and then re-sealed to hide the drugs. We can only assume that said task was a massive pain in the ass to perform, so we have to imagine how annoyed everyone involved must be at the fact that their scheme was undermined and discovered because cops noticed that the fake name they slapped on the coffee bag, “Santino D’Antonio,” was also the name of the sleazy bad guy Riccardo Scamarcio plays in John Wick: Chapter 2.
Here’s what we love about this story, though: It proves that there are apparently die-hard Keanu Reeves fans operating on both sides of the drug war, engaged in a constantly escalating game of cat and Matrix with each other. (Cat and Lake House? We’re still workshopping this one.) Honestly, we’d watch this movie; it’s kind of like Heat, except instead of trading world-weary reflections on work and love with each other, our dueling protagonists are constantly ambushing their counterpart with references to Johnny Utah and Man Of Tai Chi.