‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ steps up the action
Starting about halfway through “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the latest installment in the franchise that has turned Keanu Reeves into the coolest movie assassin ever, a viewer starts to get the sinking feeling that many people must have died so that this film could live. Much as with the “Mad Max” movies, “The Raid” films and John Woo’s “Hard-boiled,” the stunts are both so athletic and brutal that you have to figure there’s an unmarked grave somewhere in the world piled high with the broken bones of battered and bruised stunt performers.
The “John Wick” franchise, helmed by kick-boxer turned stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski, has always valued action over plot, visual pop over cerebral reflection or, heck, even common sense. But “Chapter 4” takes it all to such cartoonish extremes that it makes the previous films look like PBS documentaries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
After all, there’s a scene in “Chapter 4” that probably will go down as one of the action set pieces of the year. The moving camera is suspended well above the activity, looking down as if a child viewing an ant farm. But imagine the ants all have guns. It’s an absolutely fantastic piece of filmmaking, one that’s going to have tongues wagging long after people have filed out of the theater. And it’s not the only one.
Plot? There is one, but it doesn’t matter all that much, it’s merely a slim thread stitching together a cacophony of gunshots and gut punches. Over the course of the last three movies, Wick (still played with an exceedingly grim stoicism by Reeves) has so angered members of the High Table — the Illuminati of the underworld, the organization that controls all criminal activity — that they will do anything to rub him out. They thought they had gotten rid of him at the end of “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” but no such luck.
The High Table has a new Marquis (Bill Skarsgard), sort of the organization’s CEO, whose
cruelty knows no bounds and whose job number one is to rid the world of the meddlesome and murderous John Wick. There’s a huge bounty on Wick’s head, a number that attracts would-be bounty hunters, including Tracker (Shamier Anderson, “Invasion”) who may or may not have other ideas. He also has a killer dog, a shoutout to the previous films, all of which featured Wick’s dog. And then there’s a former friend, Caine (Hong Kong film martial arts star Donnie Yen), a blind assassin who is working for the High Table, although not altogether enthusiastically. Also along for the ride as bad guys are action stars Scott Adkins ("Day Shift,” “Ip Man 4: The Finale”) and Marko Zaror ("Alita: Battle
Angel”).
Wick, on the other hand, isn’t totally alone, as he has help from his pals Winston (Ian Mcshane), Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), Charon (the late Lance Reddick, who died unexpectedly March 17) and, reluctantly, Shimazu’s daughter, Akira (Rina Sawayama).
Everything climaxes in spectacular fashion, first at a techno club in Berlin (where the revelers don’t seem to be all that bothered by all the mayhem going on around them) and, especially, in Paris, with a head-spinning action sequence in the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe and on the 300 stairs at the Sacré Coeur. It’s a dizzying whirlwind of off-the-rails kineticism that also shows Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten, Michael Finch and Derek Kolstad have a sense of humor.
Not only do they include an elaborate salute to Walter Hill’s controversial 1979 film “The Warriors,” in which would-be assassins in both films are kept
abreast of our hero’s whereabouts by a faceless DJ on an over-the-air broadcast, the name of the station here is WUXIA, a reference to a genre of gravitydefying, not-particularly realistic Chinese martial-arts films. It’s as if Stahelski and company wanted to offer a shoutout to their spiritual forebears in true gamerecognizes-game fashion.
On top of that, much of the Sacré Coeur scene is cut to the beats of “Genesis,” by the Paris electronic outfit Justice. Nothing like giving the hometown crew some shine.
At nearly three hours, “John Wick: Chapter 4” is too long; the beginning is slow but the last half makes up for it, even though all the shooting is wearying after awhile. But once it gets going, there really is only one thing to do: duck. Running time: 2 hours 49 minutes
Rating: R (pervasive strong violence, strong language) cary.darling @houstonchronicle.com