3-2-1: John Wick: Chapter 4

 2023, d. Chad Stahelski - in theatre

The What 100:
John Wick continues his reign of vengeance against The Table, his friends fewer and fewer while the price on his head goes higher and higher. The Marquis de Gramont has his mission from The Table: kill John Wick and punish anyone who helps him.  John Wick brings with him ruin wherever he goes, and, he is told, his only way out is death...until another option is presented to him....
Or.
170 minutes of relentless, impossible violence.

3-2-1

3 BAD: (1) JW, superhero. John "Baba Yaga" Wick is a total cartoon character at this point. He can survive pretty much anything and keep going, seemingly finding another gear, and another, and another until he's on, like, gear 18 by the end of this journey.  In one sequence, JW is hit by cars at least four times, and not slow moving vehicles either. Where other men are out of the game with one strike, Wick gets up and keeps on fighting, and fighting, and fighting. Without some sort of superpower or supernatural explanation, it stretches credulity. In a later scene (still only a few minutes after being hit by multiple cars in story time) JW jumps out a fourth story window and bounces off the edge of a van parked below, hitting the pavement hard. He not only survives, but gets up and walks away, pained, but not many-broken-ribs pained, or coughing-up-blood-from-a-punctured-lung pained. I wasn't giving up on the action and adventure after these (or many other points) but I had an audible "yeah, right!" reaction so often in this movie. And that's not to mention all the bullets JW's taking.

(2) Bulletproof.  The bulletproof suit was introduced in the Chapter 2, so it's one of the conceits of the series, so that doesn't really bother me. But there is still a logic factor to it...even if a bullet doesn't pass through into the flesh, all that energy that it has heading into the suit has to go somewhere and it will be felt by the wearer. Bruises and cracked or broken bones. It's going to severely injure someone, and you'll be feeling it for days if not more. Not John Wick though. Where others JW goes up against kind of get pinned down by the repeated shots, JW just keeps moving.  It's a consistency thing.

In relaying the film's features and follies to the wife, I noted that the film runs 170 minutes because seemingly everyone is wearing bulletproof suits, so my real problem with them is it takes forever for John Wick to kill anyone. The fight scenes are long, and the longer they go on the more monotonous they start to get, the more I want the film to move on to something else.

(3) A video game world. The world of John Wick is comprised of 95% assassins and murderers and people who work for The Table. There are so few people in this world outside of them, and none of them, except for John Wick's dead wife or Caine's (Donnie Yen) daughter.  At one point, JW is having an all out brawl with goons and a boss-level baddie in a sprawling bunker of a rave club. It's jam packed with people, and John is burying axes in people's heads or shooting people, and the by-dancers (as opposed to bystanders) don't seem to notice. The fight goes on for many minutes before people start to flee the scene. They're digital noise, in a way, like the backdrop of a Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter game. They're not real people, they don't really even exist, they're just part of the setting.

It's the same when JW is fighting seemingly every mercenary in Paris in the roundabout of the Arc de Triomphe. There are cars and vehicles driven by non-enemy players, but do we see them? Do they matter? When someone slams into a vehicle does it seem like anyone is even driving it? Not so much. There's almost a point to Stahelski not including any collateral damage in the film. He doesn't want the audience, at any point to be taken out of the underworld that the fighters exist in, and one simple death of a bystander would blow the whole thing up.  And the dead bodies that should pile up, seem to disappear when the camera pans away.

John Wick is a video game world. JW is the player character, he has levels to go through, and bosses to beat, and between levels, there are the story cut scenes. It does all this pretty well, but I'm not a gamer, this isn't my language, so it all feels somewhat hollow.

2 GREAT: (1) Scott Adkins' Killa Harkan. I used to really detest Keanu as an actor. "The little wooden boy" I would call him. I would watch films he starred in despite his presence, not because of. In the John Wick series, I have to give him full credit...he has real presence, and a commendable physical acumen. But 4 out of every 5 line deliveries I'm asking "that's the take you're going with?" It's like he doesn't quite understand what the words coming out of his mouth mean, an alien of some kind, detached from common communication. It doesn't matter what language he's speaking (and he speaks a few in this one) the line readings are all very, very awkward.

So that's why they have some phenomenal character actors in this beast. We'll get to Donnie Yen and Bill Skarsgård in a moment, but the absolute standout player in this is B-movie action star Scott Adkins. I don't really know Adkins' work, I just know of him. I've heard talk of many of the lower-budget, direct-to-video/on demand he stars in being elevated by his presence, and his fighting / stunt coordination skills. But here, in John Wick: Chapter 4, Adkins delivers a performance. It's scenery masticating with capital "A" Acting! Adkins is a big guy to begin with but here he's got prosthetic on both his face and body to pad him out into not just a burly man, but the burliest. I think of the comic book character Kingpin who is always well tailored but is just drawn like a stone wall covered in fabric. Inside Killa, Adkins has a chin that disappears into his neck, three gold fronts in his mouth, and a playful German accent that doesn't quite hold water. Adkins sits across a table from Reeves, Yen, and Shamier Anderson, all three who can hold the screen, and he dominates them with his devious congeniality. I think of big, cartoonish, in-makeup roles like Al Pachino's Flat Top in Dick Tracy or Colin Farrell as the Penguin in The Batman. This is the best performance in the movie.  And when the big man finally gets into the fight, he's not a pushover, he's every bit that wall of fabric that the Kingpin is, but far more agile, unexpectedly delivering patented Adkins high kicks. 

(2) Donnie Yen. What a great presence Donnie Yen is. Is it any wonder that the film seems to take its leave

of John Wick for, like, a ten minute stretch and just let Donnie Yen's blind master, Caine, take the scene. The first act is almost more Yen's than Reeve's and all the warmth and charm that John Wick doesn't have can be found in Yen's performance.  Caine is, ostensibly, the second lead of the film.  He is also a man with a reason to kill.  He's been set upon John Wick by the Marquis, his daughter's life effectively in the balance. Should he fail to kill JW, both his life and his daughter's are forfeit. But he and John are friends, from way back, so he doesn't take this task lightly, though he's also keenly aware that John is not going to be an easy kill, so there is double reticence to his approach. Yen has a wonderful scene with Hiroyuki Sanada, again, old friends, but whom he's forced to combat, and there's no pleasure in the dance. Yen manages to deliver compassion, respect and admiration while in a fight for his own life. Yen has played a blind master before, in Rogue One, and he's very effective at it. There's a moment in the poker game with Killa where Yen holds the cards up to his face real close and quickly puts them down. Having a good friend who is legally blind, I'm very familiar with that type of reading, which leads me to believe Yen is playing visually impaired, but not full blind.  There's the whole Zatoichi aspect to the character that, once you introduce guns into the equation, becomes much more fantastical, and somehow I'm much more okay with Caine's ability to escape harm then I am with John Wick's ability to absorb it. 

1 GOOD: Bill Skarsgård's Marquis de Gramont.  For my many reservations about this film, it is a success, if only because it manages to earn its 170 minutes when it really should have no right to such an inflated run-time.  It's a testament to Stahlenski's visual acumen, making every scene gorgeous to look at, and his stunt team who go above and beyond with every fight...but it just wouldn't play, like, at all, without a big bad behind it. It's not that the Marquis is particularly well written...these types of vainglorious, ruthless characters with a simmering evil are everywhere, but it's what Skarsgård does with it that makes it utterly compelling. There's a composure to his Marquis, one that so very rarely cracks, such that when he does, it's quite delicious to watch. Skarsgård's performance here has that Scandanavian reserve (even though he's playing French) that reminds me of Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, except if Le Chiffre's station in life was so much closer to the top. They garb the Marquis in such elegant finery that screams customized, each wardrobe tailored only for him. The design is very 1800s chic but with a contemporary line in a way that can only be described as "dandy".  Does the uniform fit the performance or vice versa.  The Marquis likes to think himself unpredictable, which makes him easily manipulated. He's just got power and money and authority, which makes him hard to get to...so the challenge for John Wick is getting to him, and more than anything, the Marquis wants to make sure that never happens.  

META:
In the end, after 170 minutes of people getting shot in the head, I had to ask, what's the point? Not of movies, which is entertainment, but of the story, both in this film and the series, what is the point? What is the objective John Wick is trying to achieve, and does it feel in any way appropriately satisfying how this film ends? Do we feel like the character had a meaningful journey, and made some sort of difference in his bleak, bullet riddled world?

I am not a John Wick devotee. I've seen each of the films and liked them to varying degrees, but I've only watched them once. I may have lost the plot on what exactly ol' JW was trying to accomplish through four of these features and hundreds of dead bodies. It certainly didn't seem like the end goal was killing the Marquis, who is just a face up front, a representative of The Table.  I was seriously expecting this to be a "John hunts down every member of the table and kills them, dismantling the table in the process." Alas, that seems to be an impossibility so John's looking for an out, from this life he's living.  But is this end agreeable? I came out of 170 minutes asking "is that it?" And I'm not really asking for more.

At a certain point in this film, quite early on, I grew...not tired...numb, I grew numb to the violence of it. The repeated sound of guns firing became a sensation that barely registered by the end. I found any form of combat without the guns to be far more enjoyable.  At one point JW gets a set of nunchucks and watching him beat people with that was far more enjoyable than the gunfighting.  That sort of very American excess of bullets and carnage, when it gives way to the more poetic dance of swordfights, is such a blessing.  This is a gun-centric series though, and the glowing reverence for Wick's preferred handgun, when the Bowery King presents it to him, made me feel kind of ill to my stomach knowing that the scene is there for the gun lovers in the crowd.  This isn't an inspirational series, it's an escapist nightmarescape, one that aptly ends where any gun-obsessed, revenge-fuelled movie should. There's no happy endings in that world.

I think of other action-first movies, like Dredd or The Raid: Redemption, and these are films I enjoyed quite a bit but that I never really go back to because they don't really have a story to tell.  The first John Wick created a world, on that seemed so intriguing and full of promise, but that promise never really bore fruit for me. The world was maybe developed (if not to my satisfaction, it's still developed) but the character we're following through that world never changes, grows or learns anything.  So I say again what's the point?  There's a reason I haven't rewatched this series, and I don't really have any desire to... there's not really anything there beyond the stylish thrills of mass murder.

RIP Lance Reddick.