Keanu Reeves as John Wick.Murray Close/Lionsgate
- John Wick: Chapter 4
- Directed by Chad Stahelski
- Written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch
- Starring Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen and Ian McShane
- Classification 18A; 165 minutes
- Opens in theatres March 24
As a rule, I try to avoid reading reviews before watching a movie that I also intend to review. Partly because it makes me feel better about not having been given access to a title earlier than other American critics, partly because it just makes good sense to go in as fresh as possible. But being a creature of the internet comes with occupational hazards, and I’ll often trip into reviews and bits of reaction, unable to look away. Which is why a recent tweet from New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri grabbed hold of my eyeballs the other week: “JOHN WICK 4: I think I’m embargoed still, but … we are gonna need a Best Fall award in next year’s Stunt Awards.”
Hmm, interesting. So, I entered my (weeks-later) press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 anticipating one helluva fall from a surprisingly strong film franchise that has consistently one-upped itself in bold, bone-breaking stunt work. And then, about an hour into the film, the great big “fall” moment arrived, a nasty plunge undertaken by a Berlin gangster that lands with the best kind of bloody thud. I smiled the kind of grin that comes with watching Keanu Reeves do very bad things to very bad men. Good one, Bilge.
Laurence Fishburne as Bowery King, left, and Ian McShane as Winston.Murray Close/Lionsgate
But it turns out that fall wasn’t exactly the moment that my colleague was referring to, because 20 minutes later came another epic tumble. And then another. And then one more exceptionally long, magnificently staged, intentionally self-conscious fall that will surely live as one of the very best and most outrageously choreographed moments of injury to ever be staged in an action movie. Bilge, you sly spoiler, you.
Unfortunately, there are as many high “falls” in the new John Wick as there are distressingly low stumbles. Clocking in at a severely bloated 165 minutes, Chapter 4 is both a thrill and a slog, an all-you-can-eat buffet that insists on stuffing your guts before it spills them. By the time that the movie reaches its beautifully brutal finale – a 45-minute stretch containing some of the best fight scenes ever committed to the screen – your attention span might be so wounded as to become brain-dead to John Wick’s gutter-minded charms.
If you don’t remember what happened at the end of the colourfully titled John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, don’t worry: the filmmakers have abandoned both any pretense of narrative cohesion and dash-necessitating titles. All you need to know is that our contract-killer hero John Wick (Reeves) is once again on the run from the criminal organization called The Table that seems to run the entire world, and that his solution to such a conundrum is the same as it has ever been: he is going to “kill them all.”
Rina Sawayama as Akira Shimazu.Murray Close/Lionsgate
Practically, this means that John must travel all over the world – the deserts of Casablanca, the brutalist underground clubs of Berlin, the gilded palaces of Paris, the neon-drenched streets of Osaka – to shoot, stab and incinerate hundreds and hundreds of his fellow assassins. (If I were a hitman in John Wick’s world, I would simply choose to not try to kill the man.) The carnage is delivered in the fashion of a video game: one big level leads to another and then another, until John gets into a room with the final boss: the pompous Marquis (Bill Skarsgard), who has as many resources as he does slippery accents.
On paper, this all sounds like super-violent fun – and it can be, at least whenever returning director Chad Stahelski stages his massive, how’d-he-do-that set pieces. There is a samurai/sumo wrestler/gun-kata melee inside a sleek Japanese hotel. A long, unbroken overhead shot of an apartment-set battle whose camerawork rips off Brian De Palma almost as good as De Palma once ripped off Alfred Hitchcock. A dizzying fight set against a swirl of cars crashing around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The technical skills on display here are astounding – you will walk away convinced that dozens of stuntmen gave their very lives for this movie, and that somewhere deep underneath Hollywood there is a top-secret lab tasked solely with pumping out new cloned copies of Keanu Reeves.
And then there are the murderer’s row of actors that Stahelski assembles to play, well, murderers. There are familiar Wick faces including Ian McShane (as the manager of the Continental, a killers-only hotel), Reeves’s Matrix co-star Laurence Fishburne (the leader of a group of homeless assassins), and the recently passed Lance Reddick (as that hotel’s icily cool concierge). And there are also such fiery new faces as Canadian actor Shamier Anderson (a hungry Wick rival who keeps delaying his kill-shot until the price on John’s head hits a certain number), Hiroyuki Sanada (an old ally who runs the Osaka outpost of the Continental), and Hong Kong action legend Donnie Yen (revisiting his blind-assassin character from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story).
Donnie Yen as Caine, centre, and Scott Adkins as Killa.Murray Close/Lionsgate
But far too often, especially during the film’s first 90 minutes, the action pauses for stiff, semi-serious scenes unpacking the underworld arcana that the first three films built up with increasing ponderousness.
The details of John Wick’s world are gloriously absurd – this is a live-action cartoon filled with bulletproof three-piece suits, parkouring dogs, characters outfitted like Dick Tracy villains (direct-to-video action star Scott Adkins is hidden underneath layers of prosthetic makeup here to play a purple-clad whale of a crime lord), and an assassin-only radio station with the call letters “WUXIA” (as in the Chinese martial arts genre).
But there are long stretches in Chapter 4 that seem to forget that this is all rather silly, and start to treat the Wick-verse as a deadly serious saga, Talmudic in its rules and intricacies.
Perhaps Reeves, McShane and the delectably detestable Skarsgard got a kick out of talking solemnly about The Table and all its various procedures while sitting inside ornately decorated spaces designed for the inside of Tatler magazine. It was likely a lot easier than taking a punch or ducking gunfire over and over. But I couldn’t help but get anxious, impatient, even bored while waiting for Chapter 4 to get back to the next big “fall.”
Barry Hertz