Title: John Wick: Chapter 4
Describe This Movie In One Life of Brian Quote:
ARTHUR: He’s making it up as he goes along!
Brief Plot Synopsis:ย “And on that farm he … shot some guys.“
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film:ย 4 Ned Kellys out of 5.
Tagline:ย “Baba Yaga.”
Better Tagline:ย “Between this and Dungeons & Dragons, bows and arrows are making a big comeback.”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Missing (though not presumed dead), John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still maneuvering against the High Table. They, in turn, are sick of his shenanigans, and send the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgรฅrd) to deal with the problem. He starts by destroying the Continental and declaring its manager Winston (Ian McShane) excommunicado. He also forces Caine (Donnie Yen), an old acquaintance of Wick’s, to hunt him down. Before you can say “Rick Steves,” the hunted Wick embarks on an intercontinental murder mission to rid himself of the Marquis (and possibly the High Table itself) once and for all.
“Critical” Analysis:ย Imagine a 2013 pitch meeting, casting a middle-aged dude past his action prime as a widower assassin avenging his dead puppy, in a movie directed by that same actor’s stunt double. I doubt anyone present could have foreseen it launching a lucrative franchise subsisting on ultraviolence and a fantastical global murder economy.
Originally conceived by director Chad Stahelski (the aforementioned stunt double) and Derek Kolstad, the John Wickย movies have taken that simple revenge concept and created a bananapants mythology to rival that of your average fantasy trilogy. Who cares if it barely makes sense, did you see John Wick kill those dudes with a horse in Parabellum?
The one constant at the center is Reeves’s monosyllabic mass murderer, a man so driven by grief and rage he’s able to ignore everyone he knows offering some variation of, “This is your fault,” or, “All this is because of you.” Statements that might be impactful if John Wick gave a f*ck, but Wick โ a man without a wife *or* a dog โ gives absolutely zero f*cks.
Stahelski and company have definitely learned their lessons from the first movie, by the way, because as with Chapter 2ย and Parabellum, dogs are safe this time around (in this case, the German Shepherd belonging to Shamier Anderson’s “Mr. Nobody”). In fact, the dog in question plays a crucial role in Wick’s and Nobody’s eventual relationship.
Chapter 4ย comes in at a shade under three hours, and the deliberate pacing of the first 30 minutes is a bit of a chore. From that point on, however, it’s an almost exhausting cavalcade of kung fu and head shots as Wick works his way through the ranks to get to the Marquis.
Things are a little more Three Stooges-y this time around, especially when it comes to Yen’s Caine, whose fighting style is a bit more exaggerated thanks to his blindness. Yes, it’s another blind characterย (my theory is that filmmakers do this because nobody would buy that a Donnie Yen with two functioning eyes could ever lose a fight). Reeves himself is also leaner than in previous outings, and his fight scenes come across as less labored than in Parabellum.
Dan Laustsen’s cinematography is gorgeous, and the fight choreography just keeps getting better, with one penultimate firefight shot overhead as the action moves through a French mansion. A tad overindulgent? Perhaps, but no complaints here.
John Wick: Chapter 4ย gives you everything you could ask for: gun fu, ninja throwing stars, multiple instances of seeing a dog sic balls, Scott Adkins in a fatsuit, homages to The Warriorsย and Lawrence of Arabia, and a kill count almost twice as high as the original.
And it remains a ridiculous exercise. John Wick gets hit by at least four cars, bludgeoned and shot by the Maquis’s unending army of Brock Samsons, and falls out of a building/down a giant staircase multiple times. That last one largely thanks to the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) dropping him off at the Eiffel Tower when he needed to get toย Sacrรฉ-Cลur. That’s over three miles away, asshole!
The ending of Chapter 4ย doesn’t appear to leave a lot of room for another sequel, but this is going to be a billion dollar franchise before all is said and done. Time will tell if Stahelski and Reeves can leave well enough alone or kill the endeavor by milking it for too long. Maybe they should ask their Marvel comrades about that.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is in theaters now.
This article appears in Jan 1 โ Dec 31, 2023.
