John Wick: Chapter Four – In Review

John Wick: Chapter One? That was a surprise hit that came out of nowhere, bringing Keanu Reeves back into the spotlight and pairing him alongside stunt actor and coordinator turned director Chad Stahelski. John Wick 1 told a strong self contained story of revenge within a secret underground society. Realism isn’t the right word to define it, but rather grounded in a sort of action reality that emphasized why Wick’s name caused his enemies to tremble in fear.

John Wick: Chapter Two? For the longest time that was my favorite of the three: it expanded on the world and action. The sets were varied, but it wasn’t just about stylized action. The cinematography and the editing were at the top of its game. Keanu Reeves wouldn’t need to ask Liam Neeson how to climb over a fence here. It was also the franchise’s first step into the more absurd, almost cartoonish elements that would find themselves escalated as the franchise continued: specifically the custom tailored suits that stopped bullets. This marked John Wick 2 as one of the few movies that allowed the main character to be shot many times and still live, uninjured, but it was also the franchises first step towards a very specific and silly style of combat the centered around using your suit jacket as a shield.

John Wick: Chapter Three – Parabellum, the only Wick film with a subtitle? That was just ridiculous. There was a part of the movie where John asks where he could find someone and he was told to go out into the desert and then just keep walking until he passed out. And he did that. And it worked. Also, now the bad guys have even better armor that stops all regular bullets. There’s a whole action scene that could have been cut and the story would’ve have been affected. John spends a minute assembling a gun just to shoot one bad guy. I didn’t care for this one so much.

John Wick 2 and 3 both ended on cliffhangers, and the fourth film only sort of picks up from where the third one leaves off. The ending of the third film seemed to explicitly state that John and the Bowery King (expertly played by Laurence Fishburne) were going to be teaming up against the High Table, only for the King to largely be sidelined into the role of tailored suit delivery. Instead, Wick goes on a path of violence across the world in order to figure out who’s hunting him, and how he could get off the assassins most wanted list.

The story isn’t that much of a priority here, possibly less so than in the previous films, with extended action scenes that at their best are incredible works of cinematography that other action movies should look to for inspiration. There’s the simple stuff at first: this is a movie that’s happy to just point the camera at the action and film it, unlike the countless films that prefer to shake the camera around as if the film was produced in the middle of an earthquake, edited by goldfish, but there’s much more to it than that. There’s a focus on variety in its choreography and the set pieces and stunts. One scene in particular features a camera that shifts upward into a tracking oner that showcases the precision in the craft.

At its worst John Wick 4 stops behaving like a story that’s being told, unrestrained by the size of its budget. An early fight in a hotel goes on for far too long as replacement goons replace the replacement goons that other goons had already replaced. A car chase goes on and on, as more and more barely seen bad guys are killed off, while the story and the characters are frozen in place, unwilling to move until the next round of extraneous villains are defeated.

The character dynamic in the movie was actually pretty well done. On one end there’s the Marquee (Bill Skarsgard is amazing as expected), the leader of the hunt for Wick. He has the entire might of the High Table at his disposal, along with retired assassin Caine, and a newcomer called only by his alias: The Tracker.

Caine, played by Donnie Yen in his second major role as a blind swordsman, is blackmailed into hunting Wick. The Tracker, played by Shamier Anderson, is in it for the money, with his eyes on both Wick and the prize. It results in a chase that makes for a surprisingly strong dynamic between the three characters, both while fighting and while not, and when more than one of them is on screen everything becomes more interesting in the process.

When there’s only one of them on screen? When it’s just one of them fighting bad guys? It’s then that the stakes seem to drop away, the tension evaporates. When John is fighting unnamed masked opponents, when Caine is fighting random guards, when the Tracker is fighting miscellaneous goons, there’s no illusion that any of them are in any danger, and when those fights drag on it feels like the story has stopped entirely to support excess.

I still feel that John Wick: Chapter Four is a really good action movie, with stuntwork that excels in every area and cinematography that’s creative while also incredibly functional. If it was at least twenty minutes shorter, at least, then it would have been great.

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