At the end of his adventures, John Wick alias Keanu Reeves gives the maximum for almost three hours.
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We find John Wick right where we left off at the end of 2019’s Parabellum. Now excommunicated and hunted by every bounty hunter in the world since he killed a member of the High Table, John Wick doesn’t have just a few hand-picked friends.
Since Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick, who died last week) have been helping our man, they naturally find themselves in the crosshairs of the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), a particularly important member of the Great Table who sends his assassins after Wick . During this time, John Wick goes from New York to Osaka, then to Berlin and finally to Paris, sowing the corpses as others sow the small pebbles.
At 169 minutes long, this fourth opus feels at times – a little too much – unnecessarily heavy and lengthy, in the guise of wanting to please fans of this surprisingly successful franchise. But that doesn’t detract from its qualities.
The action is of course there. Fans will appreciate the mix of martial arts, mind-boggling stunts (especially those in Parisian traffic around the Arc de Triomphe), and inventive kills (including the scene where blind assassin Donnie Yen uses doorbells to track down his enemies).
The somewhat lengthy finale is particularly well thought out, with John Wick having to climb the 222 steps (am I the only one who sees a Hitchcock reference?) filled with assassins leading to the Sacred Heart before confronting Marquis.
Aesthetics are ever present right down to the costumes, at times reminiscent of the first The Transporter, and director Chad Stahelski takes care of everything, even considering a (!) woman and a subplot with a more humane bounty hunter (Shamier Anderson). than it seems.
Yes, John Wick: Chapter 4 gets its money’s worth and yes, this fourth installment brings the adventures of the widowed killer to a satisfying conclusion. But in the cinema, quantity doesn’t automatically rhyme with quality, and a feature film isn’t sold by length like a piece of fabric.
And so it’s a shame Chad Stahelski wasn’t more critical of his own work and spared us a good twenty minutes of useless scenes.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5