John Wick: Chapter 4
The movie as a whole, however, is an utter disappointment.
The franchise that all started with the simple concept of Keanu Reeves getting revenge for someone killing his dog continues into its fourth feature film, once again directed by former stuntman Chad Stahelski, who has been at the helm for each installment. The story picks up where Chapter 3 left off, in that John Wick is still being chased by the High Table, the underworld's most powerful criminal organization. John wishes to finally be free of the chaos his life has become, and the only way to do it is to settle things with the High Table once and for all.
None of the movies in the John Wick saga have had what I would call anything other than a bare bones plot (mainly John seeking revenge and The Table trying to stop him), but the formula is really starting to get old here. There are no real messages or themes being explored at this point; it's 100% spectacle with the expectation that the audience is on board for a dumb movie with glorious action.
And that would be fine if we hadn't already seen just about everything this new chapter offers in previous chapters. An angry John Wick on the run? Check. Getting some help from his small circle of friends including Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane as the hotel manager, and Lance Reddick as the concierge? You got it. The High Table putting out a call to the preposterous number of assassins in John Wick's general area to stop John from getting where he's going? Yup, we've got that scene again. We even have yet another rave nightclub scene (I think this is the third one?) and an extended fight scene in a room full of glass that is so remarkably similar to the climax in John Wick 3 that I thought it was the same location.
Most of the narrative intrigue has typically come from uncovering the rules of the underground society of assassins within the world of the movie, but even this has lost its charm. At this point, all we really get is impeccably dressed men and women frequenting lavishly decorated rooms sipping tea like they are members of high-class society just before launching into another fight scene and destroying most of the beautiful surroundings. There is talk of codes and ancient rules, but none of it amounts to anything but fancy window dressing on an empty building.
The plausibility of the violence in these movies was always a little goofy, but we have officially entered Fast and the Furious territory with Chapter 4. John Wick falls out of multi-story windows, gets punched, shot and stabbed multiple times, and even gets hit by two or three cars. There's nothing wrong with ignoring reality when it comes to action movies, but for a franchise that takes itself as seriously as this one seems to (or used to), it's pretty jarring. There is a particular stairway sequence that elicited a giant laugh from the theater audience, clearly one that the movie wanted to elicit, but one that really signaled the fact that these movies have abandoned all logic and entered into the realm of straight fantasy.
Stupid action tropes pile up so quickly that they are impossible to ignore. A blind guy is an unstoppable killing machine, even though some scenes show that just being still can render him useless. How this guy survives is beyond belief (even if he is played with an exhausted charm by legendary Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen). John Wick pauses to reload often, but no one ever seems to attack him in those moments. Suits have some kind of special magic bullet proofing that allows people to deflect bullets with their arms like Wonder Woman. Members of the High Table act so stupidly that you wonder how they even got to be a powerful organization in the first place. I know it's best not to dwell on these kinds of things and just enjoy the action, but at times it feels like the script was written by a group of 12-year-olds and no one bothered to give any notes.
My eyes had long since glazed over by the time we got to the end of almost three hours straight of people shooting bullets at each other while a pulsating electronic song played. Other critics are claiming this is one of the best action movies in years, and I wish I could see what they saw. This is a paper napkin story filled out by hours of mindless fight scenes, and no matter how cool the stunts are or how epic the carnage is, it's all just as empty as the billions of bullet shells littering the sidewalk wherever John Wick goes.
