In John Wick: Chapter 4, the epic climax of Keanu-Reeves’ extravagantly brutal Death Wish Meets Video Game Meets Zen action series, our hero finds himself back in a similar Berlin nightclub a vibrant Bauhaus Eurodisco with Fellini Satyricon. It’s like a concrete cathedral, with huge moshpits of dancers throwing their arms in the sky while waterfalls cascade down the side walls (it almost looks like it’s going to rain). But Reeves’ John Wick doesn’t dance as he weaves his way through the wet neon. He’s getting ready to start filming – which is more or less the same for him. As he stalks forward with oily hair down the sides of his face, the camera slides right in front of him, framing him like the renegade action demigod that he is. We are perhaps right in the middle of the most modern Cologne commercial in the world.
Then the fight begins. It’s built around guns, knives, fists, and pure will: anything that can bring about instant death. Wick faces a portly opponent with gold gangsta teeth and a lavender suit sucking on an inhaler with the indulgence of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. He will of course get what comes to him. As does the army of henchmen who inevitably confront Wick and are mowed down like Grand Theft Auto fodder. The hand-to-hand combat in a John Wick film is both unrelenting and alluring in its decrepit realism. Shot in long takes, the action flows enough to merit the term “balletic,” but it’s also vicious enough to be existential. Wick, like Bruce Lee or the heroes of the big Hong Kong action movies, never knows what’s around the corner and is always ready to face it. That’s because he’s seen the depths. His reflexes are as quick as his soul is dark.
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These days every franchise seems to be pre-figured on a company balance sheet, but the John Wick movies are the rare series that have discovered what it was as it was over time. 2014’s “John Wick” was a hit – an attempt to revitalize Reeves’ career with the last kind of role anyone would have expected of him. Yes, he’d proven his faith in action combat in the “Matrix” films, but Wick, the former underworld assassin who doesn’t seem to break away from the show’s imaginative, cult-like mob-as-illuminati hierarchy was a cutthroat desperado with a taste for sadism in his veins.
What nobody could have predicted is how well the counter-intuitive casting worked. Reeves, an actor who even in his most stoic ways can’t hide his innate liking, was warmer than the role required — and that’s what made it a connection. His John Wick was a wild badass, looking into the abyss… with a touch of decency. He started out as a noir anti-hero, but with each film the series grew more grandiose as Wick, his name a nod to his short fuse (but also short for “wicked”), was elevated to a superhero of sorts. He didn’t have any otherworldly powers, but he did have the quality of invincibility, which is the only superpower you need. “John Wick: Chapter 2” and “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” were styled as pulp reveals built around action set pieces that were now knowingly and gloriously over the top. It almost didn’t matter if the plot and dialogue were inferior. The fans experienced these scenes like drugs.
“John Wick: Chapter 4” is 2 hours and 49 minutes long, but it has a story that, if told more briskly, could fit into an 83-minute pot that you might have seen in a grindhouse in 1977 like Chad Stahelski, the series’ stuntman-turned-director who directed it, full of subdued, sinister, ritualistic verbal showdowns meant to be hypnotic as they build into each new action scene, “Chapter 4” feels like first “John Wick” film that aims to be a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. It’s like Sergio Leone crossed paths with John Woo as seen in Times Square.
The film completes the series’ cosmology with an elemental revenge-meets-deliverance plot. Wick is still chained to his obligation to the High Table, the consortium of the underworld that… controls everything. Due to the felony he committed at the Continental Hotel (a severe violation of the High Table Law), it’s as if he now has a lifetime contract with the devil. But the devil has a face: it’s the Marquis de Gramont, a fascist preppie played by baby-faced Bill Skarsgård (who, like young Matt Damon or Stephen Dorff, is said to be the wealthiest kid in the world). And there is a way out of the contract. Wick can challenge the Marquis to a duel to the death, which will take place at sunrise in front of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris.
That sounds like an easy challenge for a character killing killers like most of us eat lunch. However, there are several catches. To make the duel official, Wick must reconnect with his Russian tribal family. And the Marquis will not fight the duel himself. He hands the task over to Caine, a blind high-table assassin who’s been given lightning-fast limbs and a compelling presence by Hong Kong mixed martial arts superstar Donnie Yen. Caine, who considers Wick his comrade despite being tasked with killing him, is just as feral as Wick, and Yen bestows a polite prank on him from under his aviator goggles. The cast is completed by the charismatic Hiroyuki Sanada as the manager of the Osaka Continental, Rina Sawayama as his fighter daughter, Laurence Fishburne as the dashing, formerly dead Bowery King, and Ian McShane as Winston, who gets to watch the Marquis blow his beloved Continental to pieces. though McShane then quietly infuses the film with his cold panache, revenge is a dish best served.
Is “Chapter 4” too long? You can bet it is. At the moment it’s a liturgical service like in an action film. Still, the film is conceived as a deliberately over-the-top gift to John Wick fans, and it succeeds on that level. The Marquis keeps trying to assassinate Wick before the morning of the duel, leading to several delicious fight sequences. You’re set in the midst of the frenetic centrifugal traffic that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe, you’re thrillingly filmed from above from a doll’s house perspective, and then there’s the spectacular climax unfolding on Rue Foyatier in Montmartre, the 222nd step of the staircase , which leads to the Basilica. When Wick springs into action (and at one point rolls down the entire flight) it becomes an exhilarating stairway to hell that eventually leads John Wick to a gratifying karmic goal he’s earned in this series.
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