John Wick is on the run again in extravagant action thriller ‘Parabellum’
Movies can be blessedly simple. As the first “John Wick” showed, all you really need is a car, a gun, a dead dog and Keanu Reeves. Who needs “kiss kiss” when you’ve got plenty of “bang bang”?
Alas, nothing in today’s movie-land stays minor-key. Chad Stahelski’s “John Wick” has quickly spouted into a three-and-counting series, the latest of which is “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.” What was once a taut, minimalist action movie with an appeal predicated on low-expectations and leanness has grown into a franchise with a typically overcooked subtitle and de-rigueur worldbuilding (the film’s press notes reference “the Wickian universe”).
“Parabellum” finds Stahelski, Reeves’ former stunt double who has directed all three films, moving further beyond Wick’s hardboiled origins and into a more extravagant action thriller. In its ever-expanding fictional realm, “Parabellum” isn’t so dissimilar from a superhero movie, only one with way more blood, a much higher body count and, yes, righteously better action scenes.
It starts right where we left off with Reeves’ uber-hitman. He’s on the run in New York having violated the fiercely enforced rules of the High Table, an international assassin’s guild that sets combat protocol for a vast criminal netherworld, including that no “business” should be conducted in the Continental, the Manhattan hotel presided over with panache by its manager, Winston (Ian McShane).
Ruthless as the world of John Wick is, it’s a rigidly ordered one, full of slavish fidelity to a warrior code that’s part samurai, part magician. There’s a $14 million bounty on Wick’s head, just posted by the High Table, which has begun a soon-to-conclude countdown to make Wick “excommunicado.” For every other bounty hunter, it’s open-season on John Wick. And in these films, one lurks down every alley; the ratio of regular person to hitman is, like, 2 to 1.
With pursuers all around, Wick stealthily seeks out old associates for help, including Anjelica Huston, as a kind of ballet-andwrestling instructor, and Halle Berry, who has a fiefdom in Casablanca and a few lethal dogs that severely test the bounds of “good boy.” He appeals to them on the basis of old bonds that, he hopes, supersede the decrees of the High Table.
But most come to the “John Wick” films for the hyperkinetic videogame action sequences. With a seamless mix of CGI and stunt work, Stahelski fluidly choreographs ballets of bullets and endless violent encounters across a grim cityscape. The action is clever, stylish and syncopated with the camera in motion.
There is no doubt that these sequences are quite easily, in form and execution, a cut above what most any other action film is currently doing. But “Parabellum” often squanders its finesse by resorting, countless times, to execution-like killings. As the body count swells, the relentless sound of gun blasts, and the occasional knife stuck in a skull, begins to pulverize.
Fans will surely eat it all up.