John Wick: Chapter 4

Not long into this year's JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 I began to realize I was only watching out of obligation, with an obsessive/completist's m.o.  I did much the same for this summer's INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, and many before it.   Likely knowing ahead of time that I'll be watching inferior retreats of the magic that came before.  Perhaps hoping I'll be wrong and happen upon a MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, BLADE RUNNER 2049, or TOP GUN: MAVERICK.  But they're rarities, exceptions.  As Roger Ebert once said, sequels are "filmed deals".  Usually entirely unnecessary and often ill advised from an artistic standpoint.  I was certain that Keanu Reeves' fourth bullet fest would be repetitive and absurd, and I was ready to be apologetic and entertained.

And I was, but director Chad Stahelski, who also helmed the three previous Wick adventures, should've never let this thing play for almost three hours.  To me, this is ridiculously overlong.  Notwithstanding that Nathan Orloff's editing allows a brisk pace.  The running time only elongates impressive but increasingly silly action set pieces, my favorite involving Wick's firefight with a High Table member in a Berlin disco.  Bodies are riddled with bullets, knives, and axes all around.  Clubgoers centimeters away just keep on dancing, taking an awfully long time to realize, OMG, maybe we should flee this scene.  Oops, I'm looking for plausibility.

There is none to be found in JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, and that's never really been a issue.  These films, in their sparkling neon (and color oversaturated) digital glory, are simply video games, and now we're at the last few levels.  Or are we?

This time Wick seeks to strike back at the High Table.  Unfortunately, one member is Caine (Donnie Yen), a retired blind assassin and old friend of John's, clearly modeled after the legendary Zatoichi swordsman.   He is enlisted/forced by a fellow Table member, the hissable Marquis Vincent Bisset de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard) to terminate Mr. Wick or his daughter will be terminated.  The Marquis will also unleash his death squads on Continental Hotel manager Winston (Ian McShane), his concierge Charon (Lance Reddick), and Osaka Hotel manager Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter, concierge Akira (Rina Sawayama).  

I don't want to spoil anything for the faithful, but there will be an old fashioned twenty paces duel at the climax.  But not before John Wick has to clear a smorgasbord of Parisians looking to collect the bounty on his head, a deliriously violent series of battles that stretch from in front of the Eiffel Tower to the many, many steps at the Sacre-Coeur.  Battles that become so over the top one has to laugh.

I love shit like this, truth be told.  No matter how refined my tastes have grown over the past fifty plus years, I still crave a good shoot 'em up.  Even one where the storyline doesn't amount to anything and is best ignored.  But the entire Wick saga, which again simply boils down to vengeance for his former associates' murdering of his dog and torching of his home, is just so juvenile and dumb.  The world it builds is intriguing (love the hotels), but while the action is always tongue in cheek it seems the screenwriters - this time Shay Hatten and Michael Finch - take the story and lore way too seriously.  Except for the finale, which was fairly successful on an emotional level. 

Stahelski still does good work, but here I go again, the computer generated effects really work against all the skillful choreography.  This could really be epic if they somehow could've just done it old school.  Maybe impossible with all those crazy logistics.  

I enjoyed the movie homages, which included amusing nods to THE WARRIORS and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Laurence Fishburne returns as retired crime boss Bowery King, a kindred spirit who provides shelter (and a kevlar suit) to Wick.  It is again fun to see a mini-MATRIX  reunion with them but there's not enough of it.  Or of Reddick, whose last film this is (and to whom it is dedicated). 

Keanu repeats his laconic, barely verbal bit in the great tradition of Action Heroes of Old, though this time he sounds a bit cognitively impaired.  Understandable with all he's been though, I guess.

P.S. - The post credits sequence promises more to come, at least a spin-off.