What is a John Wick movie? A confluence of neon-lit backdrops, thumping EDM kill music, a stony Keanu Reeves hacking through monosyllabic dialogue, and more minutes of gun-fu action choreography than most other movies have just plain minutes, John Wick has become a genre unto itself. A John Wick movie is just that: a John Wick movie. And this John Wick movie, John Wick: Chapter 4, is the most John Wick of them all.
The High Table, the ruling class of the John Wick universe’s not-so-secret cabal of underworld assassins, wants John Wick dead. This has something to do with the events of the previous movie but to actually try to remember plot points from the series’ increasingly hazy lore would be missing the point. Which is: it doesn’t matter. Just sit back and let John Wick into your hearts.
The Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), this movie’s primary sneering baddie, will spare no expense to ensure that the world’s deadliest assassin is wiped off the map. His motivation: reasons. By enlisting John Wick’s closest friend Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin who, yes, wields a cane, and a dog-loving tracker named Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), he plans to bring John Wick’s reign of terror to a close. Add in about 150 minutes of shoot-em-up action and you have yourself a verifiable John Wick chapter.
John Wick: Chapter 4 will have you questioning everything. Do bullets hurt? Are cars soft? Is half the world’s population sleeper assassins? Can Keanu Reeves act? The brilliance of John Wick: Chapter 4 is despite how insanely absurd everything in this cartoonish ultra-violent universe may be, it remains a ridiculously good hang. You don’t care that John Wick is somehow alive after being being shot off the roof of the Continental hotel some twenty stories up. Nor does it matter that the man who shot him, hotel manager Winston (Ian McShane sporting a blindingly white new pair of teeth), is suddenly allied with John Wick once more. John Wick’s is not a universe that troubles itself with consequence or mortality or logic. And quite frankly, it might just be all the better for it.
Like the Fast and Furious films before it, the John Wick films have untethered themselves from the fabric of our reality, turning a man who was once just a vicious killing machine into a truly superhuman gun-wielding god of war. Even if we’re to accept that John Wick wears ballistic couture (bullet proof suits that are also stylish seize the day), he’s still somehow immune to things that would normally gravely injure a human being like: getting hit by a car, falling off a building, and dying. There is something innately magical to the lack of stakes here, where we know by virtue of John Wick: Chapter 5 already having been announced that John Wick is just going to keep John Wicking and no trivial thing like getting shot or killed will stand in the way of that.
In his fourth outing as the titular character, beloved actor Keanu Reeves shows that you don’t need qualities like charisma or being a good actor to make for a good action hero. The man monotones his way through his minimal dialogue as if every line is a chore and he’s privy to a contractual agreement to keep the total syllables per line of dialogue to a maximum of seven. But what he lacks in acting ability to makes up for in choreographic brilliance. The dark-haired wonder puts on a certifiable ballet of fire and fury as the eponymous gunman, with long-time series director and true stunt king Chad Stahelski finding new ways to raise the stakes on the spectacle. There are no shortage of bombastic sequences that are so extreme and so absurd that they flirt with the line of being just too much of a good thing but Stahelski keeps finding new ways to keep things visually interesting, never more so than in a third act overhead tracking shot that had the crowd howling.
Yes, John Wick: Chapter 4 tests the limits by being nearly three hours long. Yes, some sequences could have been trimmed for a tighter edit. Yes, Keanu Reeves could have tried acting well. But this is John Wick’s world and we’re just living in it. And in John Wick’s world, we live by John Wick’s rules. John Wick movies almost beat you into submission where despite how much you want to resist, you just have to stand in awe of how John Wick the whole thing is. So if John Wick: Chapter 5 is going to be five hours of the most insane gun action this side of an impossible mission, I’ll be there with my man John Wick. Dead or alive.
CONCLUSION: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ is almost three hours of next-level gunfu insanity. Director Chad Stahelski has raised the bar on the action once more while continuing to deliver the insanely entertaining dumb guy essence of a John Wick movie. This is Mozart for morons and I love it.
