A few brief thoughts about John Wick: Chapter 4
A violent but fun action epic that seems to have nods, intentional or otherwise, to quite a few other films and TV shows.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is a lot of fun. So fun, in fact, that I want to say a few things about it, but I really don’t want to write a conventional review, because that would feel like work, and that would kill the fun. So instead, here are some bullet points, starting with a few notes about the series as a whole:
First, it is remarkable how the mythology has evolved over the course of the franchise. Indeed, just the fact that it has a mythology is kind of remarkable. The original film, which came out in 2014, was a fun little B-movie but nothing too serious: it’s about a retired hitman, John Wick (Keanu Reeves), who comes out of retirement to avenge the death of his dog—and there really isn’t much more to it than that. Yes, there are hints of a secret world, filled with assassins who follow certain rules, but it isn’t until the sequels that this world really begins to grow into something global and elaborate. Does the mythology hold together? Um… probably not. Things that are treated like big deals in one film might get written out of the story after just a few minutes in the next film. But hey.
I re-watched the first three films before seeing the fourth film, and, watching all of them in the space of just a few days, I was struck by how slight the original movie is: it runs just 101 minutes, or just a little bit more than an hour and a half before the credits start rolling. (It’s also more than an hour shorter than the new film, which runs a whopping 169 minutes.) Each of the sequels felt like a step up, to me—although Chapter 2 takes some dark turns that I didn’t really care for, like the suicide in the pool. That’s the film in which John has, perhaps, the least agency: unlike all the other films, where he is pursuing his own goals (revenge, redemption, etc.) against incredible odds, Chapter 2 begins with John being forced into doing something against his will, and his resistance to that force doesn’t really fit the momentum or trajectory of the rest of the series.1
Remember how Chapter 2 began with a clip from Buster Keaton’s The General, as a tip of the hat to the silent comedies that inspired these movies and their action scenes? The new film basically begins with a three-part homage to Lawrence of Arabia that made me laugh out loud.2 This super-long sequel definitely wears its epic pretensions on its sleeve, and hooray for that.
There is an image, early on, of four horsemen, and at first I wondered if they might be representative of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Turns out, not quite, as one of the horsemen is actually chasing the other three. But it’s a fitting image, all the same.
One of the first people John meets is “The Elder”, the highest authority in this parallel criminal universe. The Elder was played by Saïd Taghmaoui in Chapter 3 but is now played by George Georgiou… and I was kind of amused by the re-casting of this character, because I had noticed Georgiou in Carnival Row just a couple days earlier and, at the time, had recognized him as one of the Zealots in A.D. The Bible Continues.
Chapter 3 began with an “Adjudicator” showing up at the Continental Hotel and giving its manager Winston (Ian McShane) seven days to resign his position, as punishment for helping John in the previous film. Chapter 4 begins with a “Harbinger” (Clancy Brown, and I still can’t quite believe that the bad guy from the original Highlander is also the voice of Mr Krabs in Spongebob Squarepants) showing up and giving Winston one hour to evacuate the building.
Winston and his concierge, Charon (Lance Reddick), go to a skyscraper to meet a figure known as “the Marquis” (Bill Skarsgård), who is basically the ultimate antagonist in this movie. They stand in a tall room with a glass wall looking out over the city, and at one point Winston says to Charon, “You have the unshakable faith of David, my friend.” This felt like a nod to the 2009 series Kings, which starred McShane as a sort of modernized version of King Saul who did a lot of his business in skyscrapers with tall rooms and glass walls just like this.
This series has featured plenty of point-blank or almost-point-blank gunshots. In one of the very first fight scenes in this film, someone uses a bow and arrow at a similarly close range. Also: one of the combatants in that scene is a woman, and I found myself hoping the film wouldn’t do the clichéd thing of getting her to wrap her legs around the guys she was fighting, Black Widow-style. Thankfully, I don’t think she did do that—but John Wick wraps his legs around a few people!
Speaking of TV-show references, that first major fight scene takes place in Japan, and one of John Wick’s allies is played by Hiroyuki Sanada, and I think at one point in this film (not necessarily during that scene) we hear some version of ‘Paint It Black’ on the soundtrack, which amused me, as Sanada had a recurring role in HBO’s Westworld, which also made significant use of that tune.
Donnie Yen is great as a blind assassin who is coerced into trying to kill John. When I saw this film, the only movie I could remember seeing him in before was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, in which he played yet another blind warrior of sorts, and I had to check afterwards to see if he really is blind himself. (He isn’t.) Looking at his filmography now, I realize that I have seen him in several other films; I just didn’t register his name at the time, for whatever reason.
Religious language and imagery abound in this franchise. In Chapter 2, cathedrals and statues of angels loom large behind Winston during his meetings with John (the scene where he “excommunicates” John was shot by the same fountain where Godspell’s baptism scene took place), and we learn that the criminal network behind his hotel is governed by a “High Table” consisting of twelve people. By Chapter 3, Wick is brandishing a crucifix like some sort of identity badge, and people are talking about the hotel being “consecrated” and “deconsecrated”. And now, among other things, Chapter 4 gives us a nightclub with “Himmel” and “Hölle” (i.e. “Heaven” and “Hell”) banners flanking the entrance.
John Wick and at least some of his colleagues talk about their belief that they are “damned” for what they do. Sometimes, as in this film, they talk about their condemned status in churches. For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that the priests and monks that we see in this series are part of some schismatic sect, but I find myself wondering what actual function their religion serves in the lives of these criminals. It doesn’t seem to be offering the assassins any justification for what they do, and it doesn’t seem to be imposing any restraints on what they do, either. (That’s what the High Table and all its “rules” are for.) It also doesn’t seem to be offering the assassins any sort of absolution. At best, it just seems to be making the more self-aware assassins more conscious of their guilt.
One of the Russian characters crosses herself the Eastern way, from right to left. Later, one of the American characters crosses himself the Western way, from left to right. I appreciate the attention to detail.
There’s a guy here who seems to respond to everything by saying, “I am Klaus.” A nod to Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot, I assume?
The film’s middle section began to drag a bit, for me, as John Wick jumps through various hoops in a bid to regain the status within the criminal organization that he needs in order to challenge the Marquis to a duel. But once the time and place for that duel are set, the film goes from one brilliant set piece to another, as John tries to get to the duel on time, and he ends up running a bloody, bullet-infested gauntlet of bounty hunters and rival assassins all the way through Paris.
By the time John and his nemeses take their fight to the Arc de Triomphe—duking it out on the road that circles the monument, and dodging regular traffic as they do—you might begin to wonder why the police aren’t getting involved. John and his fellow assassins live in a parallel universe, like the witches and wizards of the Harry Potter movies, where they are ultimately answerable to each other and nothing they do catches the attention of the authorities—and that apparently holds true even when they are killing each other in full view of the public.
That Arc de Triomphe sequence is magnificent, and I can only wonder how long it took to film. But equally great, in a smaller-scale way, is the sequence shortly after it, in which John has to make his way up many, many outdoor steps. I won’t give anything away, but there are some bits here that are so over-the-top they get seriously funny—like a Mike Myers gag that goes on, and on, and on…—and I marveled at how those bits were funny partly because of the cinematography (the camera angles, the extended shots, etc.). Back in 2008, when Spielberg was promoting Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he said he admired the “chaos cinema” that was in vogue at the time—the frenetic editing of tight close-ups à la the Jason Bourne movies—but he also said the action in his films had to happen within the shots as much as possible to preserve the “comedy” of those sequences. That’s one thing the John Wick movies do really well.
I don’t have much else to say at the moment. I will say that I never particularly felt the urge to re-watch the first three films after seeing them the first time, but this one… I wouldn’t mind giving it another look. For now, I’ll just re-watch the trailer.
John often finds himself in situations where he is forced to make terrible choices, but he is still making choices. There is a difference, I think, between finding oneself at a fork in the road and choosing the least-worst option—which is what often happens to John—and being completely at rest until you are compelled to move by an outside force, which is basically how Chapter 2 starts, once the prologue is out of the way.
About those three parts: First, Fishburne blows out a match and we get a hard cut to a sunrise, just like a similar cut in Lawrence. Second, we see men on horseback shimmering like a mirage on the horizon, similar to Omar Sharif’s first appearance in Lawrence. Third, despite the fact that this scene is set in Morocco, the horsemen are actually riding through Wadi Rum, the valley in Jordan where Auda Abu Tayi’s tribe lived in Lawrence.