In John Wick Chapter 4, the great fights less than the sum of their punches: a review

dirty: No one will leave poor John Wick alone! The prolific assassin (Keanu Reeves, of course) has found himself embroiled in another massive battle of 3D chess, where the royal pieces belong to a nefarious criminal organization called The High Table, and the pawns are a bunch of gabronians we have fun watching John Wick blur.

This time around, our main antagonist is the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård, making an unfortunate accent), the front man of The High Table who isn’t afraid to use and destroy anyone or anything to get what he wants – Mr. Wick’s boss, natch. In addition to “offering millions of dollars to every hitman in the universe,” he has assembled an eclectic group of crooks to extract Wick or kidnap themselves, including blind swordsman and Wick’s old friend Ken (the always sweet Donnie Yen) and dog-loving, mysterious archer Tracker (Shamir). Anderson).

Among all this chaos, John Wick might see a bright light coming out of this underground tunnel. But is a life of peace a life, when it comes to the man known as Baba Yaga?

advertisement

Old dogs: John Wick: Chapter 4written by Chapter 3 The titular killer is caught in a world of violence, notes co-writer Shay Hutton and handyman Michael Finch. The characters constantly insist to his face that his freedom is not possible, and that his goal is not to finally achieve it Stop Murder but to make sure he Just killing.

It’s an interesting thematic direction for the fourth installment of the Unexpected Action franchise, one that flirts with even the self-criticism of the action franchise itself (criticism generally delivered via blunt, inorganic rhetoric; the opposite of “show, don’t tell”).

Unfortunately, this thematic orientation – violent repetition and atrophy as a raison d’être – seems to have seen in the reliably pleasing visual and physical construction of the film’s staple tropes, and inspired it. These sequences play without dynamics, height, climax, or any other traditionally satisfying element of visual storytelling. Instead, the components of the fight — whether it’s a gunshot, a cruiserweight wrestle, or “a dog eating a bad guy’s nuts” — repeat over and over, with hardly any relation to the previous fight piece we’ve just witnessed.

advertisement

John Wick: Chapter 4 (Lionsgate)