John Wick: Chapter 4

 

Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum added to the growing Wick mythos, upping the action quotient, adding more stars (Halle Berry! Laurence Fishburne! Even Angelica Huston got into the mix.), and becoming more successful commercially and critically with each release. It’s been four years since the last movie, and the love and appreciation for the franchise have only increased since then.

With John Wick: Chapter 4, the series reaches its apex point and gives you exactly what you want: more action, more death-defying stunts, more exotic locales, more murders that bend the rules of biology and physics, more sad Keanu, more, more, more. That’s the chief pleasure of Wick number four, and its fatal flaw. At 169 minutes, it eventually wears out its welcome, even if it still impresses with some of the best action choreography Hollywood can produce.

The same old John Wick (and that’s a good thing)

Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4. / Murray Close/Lionsgate

John Wick: Chapter 4‘s plot doesn’t deviate too much from its predecessors: John gets involved with the shady High Table, the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne, cool as ever) helps him out, and lots of bad guys get slaughtered in very creative ways. This time around, John runs up against the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård, who makes for a fine dandy villain), a high-ranking member of the High Table who wants John dead.

Hunted once again, John seeks shelter at the Osaka Continental, where his old friend Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and daughter Akira (the singer Rina Sawayama, good but underused) hide John before the inevitable fight between Koji’s army and Gramont’s henchman. During this battle, John meets two new characters: Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson, appropriately mysterious), a bounty hunter whose only allegiance is to who has the most money; and Caine (Donnie Yen, a good addition to the series), another old friend of Wick’s who is now working for Gramont.

After escaping Osaka, Wick meets up with Winston Scott, who we last saw shoot John off an NYC rooftop in Chapter 3. (It seems John got better.) Scott suggests the only way to defeat Gramont is to play by the High Table’s rules. In other words, he needs to challenge Gramont to a duel, and whoever wins, lives. For this duel to occur, John needs to become a member of a crime family once again, travel to Berlin, and shoot, stab, and crash into countless hordes of bad guys across famous Paris landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe and the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre.

The plot’s pretty simple, and that’s a good thing for a third sequel in a franchise like this one. Except for a scene with the Elder at the beginning that ties up a dangling plot thread from the previous film, John Wick: Chapter 4 is fairly self-contained and coherent, something that is lacking in today’s moviegoing landscape of needlessly complicated cinematic universes, multiverses, and reboots disguised as sequels.