john wick: chapter 4

Here’s a dose of hard cinematic truth - the original John Wick really ain’t all that. It’s a relatively slick and well-made action movie that harnesses the fundamental “Keanu-ness” of star Keanu Reeves… but it’s an almost painfully basic revenge thriller with tissue-thin characters and an absolutely repellent point-of-attack (it isn’t just the grim fate of Wick’s doe-eyed beagle… it’s the meta-smugness of taking the old screenwriting adage of hurting a puppy being the easiest means of establishing villainy and making it literal). It was the sequels that elevated this largely unremarkable creation to new heights of operatic action grandeur. It’s a credit to director Chad Stahelski, who’s basically dedicated himself entirely to this franchise over the past decade, making a specific point of honing his craft and ratcheting up the scope and ambition with each subsequent entry. To paraphrase Walter White, Stahelski isn’t just in the filmmaking business. He’s in the empire business... and his empire is John Wick.

John Wick: Chapter 4 feels very much like Stahelski’s magnum opus, and a Taj Mahal of action moviemaking. Once again, the plot is almost beside the point. John Wick, having narrowly eluded death yet again at the end of the third entry, has vaguely set his sights on taking down the High Table, the shadowy, all-powerful global cabal that pulls all the puppet strings… a goal that crystalizes itself in the form of the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (an exquisitely prissy Bill Skarsgard), who’s been given free rein to eliminate Wick by any means necessary (his first order of business - razing the New York Continental to the ground). The story unfolds with a certain video game logic and rhythm (Wick’s best option is to challenge the Marquis to single combat, but in order to do that he has to be reinstated by his former family, the Ruska Roma, and in order to do *that* he has to carry out a designated act of vengeance… and so on, and so forth). The movie operates with shark-like efficiency - as long as it’s in constant motion, propelling itself forward (all muscle and killing power), it functions beautifully. 

The Wick films have never been especially deep, but this time the story’s emotional girders feel particularly skeletal. This is arguably Keanu’s most minimalist performance to date… and while John Wick has never been one to mince words, he’s becoming more concept than character. That being said, the supporting cast picks up much of the slack. There’s little need to reiterate what series stalwarts such as Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and the late Lance Reddick bring to the table; it’s the new faces who particularly shine. This includes Hiroyuki Sanada and model/pop star Rina Sawayama (ripe for her own spin-off) as the proprietor of the Osaka Continental and his daughter/concierge… and action star Scott Adkins as the grotesquely villainous head of the German Table, Killa Harkan (the fact the balletic Adkins is stuffed into a Dick Tracy-style fat suit and it pays massive dividends is a sign of the franchise’s unwavering bravado). But the sequel, at the end of the day, belongs to martial arts legend Donnie Yen, in a performance of such effortless charisma and confidence and cool, it makes one wonder why his Hollywood profile has been largely nonexistent up to this point.

Yen plays the blind assassin Caine, an old friend of Wick’s who’s dragged out of retirement and coerced by the High Table into doing their dirty work. Blindness has been incorporated into martial arts films before, but the characters tend to function a lot like Daredevil - moving as if by echolocation, their skills so prodigious they simply transcend their disability. Yen actually incorporates sightlessness into his fighting style… fluid and graceful, yet constantly using tap and touch to reorient himself and regain his physical bearings (at one point he moves stealthily through space, affixing motion sensor doorbells to the surfaces in order to give himself the upper hand). The John Wick franchise has been rightfully celebrated for the goofy glee of its world-building - in which professional killers congregate at fancy hotels where the sommelier traffics in firearms rather than wine - but the series has been no less skilled at addressing its tragic existentialism. The chains of service are never truly broken. If the first John Wick was about vengeance driving the title character back into the clutches of this world, the sequels have been about the hell he’s endured trying to claw his way back out again.  ​

John Wick: Chapter 4 clocks in at a whooping 170 minutes, which feels like the height of self-indulgence for what’s essentially a jacked up ocular sugar rush… and yet the runtime rarely feels oppressive. Credit Stahelski and his increasingly versatile, Willy Wonka-esque bag of tricks. You might think you’ve seen it all when the final hour unexpectedly morphs into an impromptu ode to Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic The Warriors… or when Wick engages in fisticuffs while simultaneously dodging high-speed Parisian traffic in front of the Arc de Triomphe… or when the film pulls off an improbable, single take bird-eye’s tracking shot through an apartment complex as Wick’s shotgun blasts phosphoric thunder (an apparent nod to the relatively obscure video game The Hong Kong Massacre)… or when Wick embarks on a Sisyphean fight up the 222 steps to reach the Marquis at the Sacre-Coeur Basilica. These are sequences that should just play on continuous loop in the Louvre. Box office demand may eventually dictate a fifth Wick film, but for now it feels like Stahelski and Reeves left the mic lying on the bloody, bullet casing-riddled streets of Paris. What more could they possibly have left to give?