John Wick: Chapter 4 ★★★½
(MA) 169 minutes
It’s John Wick’s world now. As you might remember, in John Wick: Chapter 3 our sorrowful yet trigger-happy hero (Keanu Reeves) was preparing to flee the country, having broken the sacred code of the Continental, a fabled hotel in downtown Manhattan catering to the needs of him and his fellow hitmen.
In John Wick: Chapter 4, the inevitable follows. Before long, the Continental lies in ruins, its oak-faced proprietor Winston (Ian McShane) is out of a job, and a manhunt once confined to the streets of a single city has gone global.
Keanu Reeves’ John Wick could be anywhere, or everywhere at once.Credit:Murray Close/Lionsgate
As for Wick, he could be anywhere, or everywhere at once: galloping over the desert like Lawrence of Arabia, weaving past zoned-out dancers in a Berlin nightclub, contemplating the cherry blossom in Osaka or the dawn sun between the girders of the Eiffel Tower.
But wherever he goes, there’s no escaping either fate or the colleagues on his trail. Sure, it’s no big deal for him to slaughter a few dozen henchmen before breakfast, but that still leaves the more serious threats such as Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin in the pay of the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), an old-money brat with the face of a corrupt angel.
Donnie Yen plays Caine, a blind assassin who is a lethal thorn in John Wick’s side.Credit:
Things have come a long way since Wick first set out to avenge the death of his beloved puppy, although the same director, Chad Stahelski, has been in charge all along (the first instalment, a surprise hit in 2014, was co-directed by Stahelski and David Leitch).
What we’re dealing with is no unassuming B-movie but a nearly three-hour epic, stately, operatic and full of arty flourishes. Devotees anticipating wall-to-wall carnage may start getting restless around the time of the hilariously extended tracking shot that follows Winston stalking through the Louvre, where the only corpses in sight are those in the paintings.
Escalation of one kind or another is mandatory for an action franchise, but something has been lost. Where the original premise postulated a surreal realm of killers beneath the surface of the everyday, here the everyday doesn’t exist: we’re not asked to imagine the globetrotting hero waiting in line at customs or taking time out between skirmishes to get his suit dry-cleaned.
Likewise, it seems undeniable law enforcement in the Wickverse is simply not a thing, even when you blow up an entire building in Lower Manhattan or cause havoc driving the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe: no speeding tickets for our Johnny.
Still, the set-pieces are spectacular enough to justify all the build-up, especially the nocturnal chase through Paris that occupies most of the third act.
For all the gaudy lighting and camera trickery, the approach to action remains firmly performance-based: the leads do their own stunts whenever possible, the goal being to have something exciting happening in every shot.
This philosophy grounds the silliness to a degree, as does Reeves’ commitment on every level to his role, one of the best of his career. As the setting of the climax seems to acknowledge, the French symbolist poets would have understood Wick – a doomed dandy and a civilised cosmopolitan, switching languages as readily as fighting styles and always courteous, even to his foes.
He’s a sinner with a soul, we’re led to feel (the polar opposite to Tom Cruise’s depthlessly noble Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible films). Given how little he has left to live for, the enemies who keep trying to take him down could well be keeping him going, forcing him to summon the energy to fight them off. Hovering near the ground as he pauses to reload or switch weapons, he’s like an addict reaching for one more hit.
From the outset, hints are planted that there are several ways to understand the impossibility of it all. Maybe Wick was dead all along, and he’s being endlessly punished for his sins. Or maybe he’s trapped in the false world of the Matrix movies, on which Stalhelski served as stunt co-ordinator. Either way, no rest for the wicked. But John Wick 4 is at least one of the season’s livelier tours of hell.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is in cinemas from March 23.
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