John Wick: Chapter 4 Review
A bloody and brutal end to John’s story.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still being hunted by The Table for his prior transgressions. The Table, meanwhile, has given the reins to The Marquis (Bill Skarsgard), who starts his bloody hunt for John by destroying The Continental in New York. With the places to hide becoming fewer and further between, and hardcore assassins Caine (Donnie Yen) and The Tracker (Shamier Anderson) on his trail, John seeks a way to clear his name with The Table by traveling to Berlin and Paris. On the way, he’ll call in help from his old friends the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) and Winston (Ian McShane).
John Wick, and Keanu, are back and this final film is a complete bloodbath; giving fans of the series everything they could want. The runtime is epic. At 2 hours and 49 minutes, it’s a long one for sure - and particularly with the sort of film that has less story than could be expected. Instead, it’s a lengthy slugfest; with mammoth action sequences, endless shoot outs, and blood by the bucketload.
And that’s exactly what it should be.
Keanu is pulling his usual Wick Schtick, grunting his way through the bare minimum dialogue they give him. Director Chad Stahleski wisely keeps him out of the first section of the film; making him more of a bogeyman than before. In particular, the scenes at the Tokyo Continental are particularly effective, with Wick standing like a painting atop the roof, hunted by everyone around the world.
The old guard perform admirably, with Laurence Fishburne chewing the scenery extensively and Ian McShane delivering gravitas and humor in equal measure.
It’s the newcomers, though, that really shine! Donnie Yen is an absolute standout as the blind assassin Caine. He is a complete badass, and worms his way into your heart over the course of the nearly 3 hour film despite being predominantly the villain. Hiroyuki Sanada, in a role that does have some type cast feelings to it, is still very cool and fierce. Perhaps most surprising is Scott Adkins, who plays the villain Killa in a fatsuit. He monologues fantastically, but more impressive is the physicality of his role. In a film filled with a heap of frankly over the top, fantastical gun violence, the fist fight between Killa and John in a water soaked Berlin club feels the most visceral.
The fight scenes continue to be striking in this franchise. This installment continues to up the ante. There’s fantastic moments peppered throughout, but the best scenes happen in Paris - one particularly fantastic staircase sequence, a gorgeously shot overhead gun battle in a Parisian apartment, and a tense gun battle amidst hectic traffic around the Arc De Triomphe. It’s gorgeously shot, stunningly brutal, and completely inventive - as we’ve come to expect from this franchise.
The issues with the film are there to be felt. The story, for example, is as bare bones as they come. The first Wick film was a simple and engaging story of revenge, while the second and third tried to bulk out the hidden world of these assassins. Chapter 4 exists in that lore, but keeps the plot fairly simple; John is still being hunted, and needs to find a solution. He finds a solution, and needs to collect one item to make it a reality, before having to fight his way to a location to get the solution done. It’s very simple, which is a bit of a shame; if there is enough lore here to engage viewers, and enough lore to justify a spin-off TV series, why not bulk that out here and give us an actual story?
Instead, the film focuses on upping the ante on violence and visuals, which can get a little much. Some of the visuals look a little too fake - too video game. And the violence relies too heavily on crazy gun battles that are only survivable due to the abundant use of bulletproof suiting, which results in many minutes long stretches of fight scenes where our heroes and villains are constantly pulling the bottom of their suit jackets up to their face in a pretense of stopping 6 or 7 of the thousands of bullets shot at them in that moment. It destroys any believability in a film like this.
Ultimately, you find yourself longing for the feel of that first John Wick. What happened to the simplicity of that movie? More importantly, what happened to the character work? There is nothing dialogue-wise here that could possibly match John Wick’s speech in the first film where he proclaims that, yes, he is back. Perhaps that is because Wick has nothing to fight for here other than his own life. In the first film, John sought revenge; he was hurt, angry, and nothing could stop him. For the last three films, this one included, his motivation is solely self-preservation; trying to save a life that, even once he saves, he barely wants to live in. Keanu had so much more to work with in that first movie, and while the action has intensified, the emotionality behind it and the simplicity behind it has gone. For that reason, no John Wick film could top that first installment.
That being said, while this film suffers by comparison to the first one in the franchise, it is still the second best in the series by a long stretch. It’s also a fitting end, and head and shoulders above the action fare offered by other modern movies.
