John Wick Chapter 4

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”

Also, is it unfair or meta to point out the absurdity of the stoic, trudging Wick continuously putting himself in situations which make it easy for 400 assassins at a time to attack him? In the world of super assassins, do they never teach anyone to wear a disguise or try to look different for a few minutes so as to forestall the inevitable?

This is a long arsed film, be under absolutely no illusions about this. It’s fucking long. It’s almost 3 hours long. Your mileage will significantly vary as to whether you might think it is worth your time, or that you can watch it in one sitting. I was perfectly happy to leave the film after 90 minutes (by which time an important plot point is wrapped up and John kills exactly 392 Japanese people and then 674 Germans in order to get one large guy’s gold tooth (Scott Adkins, magnificent in an unfortunate fat suit, who shines like he always does in small parts).

That would have been enough of a film for me. By that time I had watched an entire sequence in a desert, in New York, which sees the destruction of The Continental, the weird hotel that caters to the assassin’s world, then a whole section in Osaka where 4000 people die, where John Wick (Keanu Reeves) spends time with a friend (the always great Hiroyuki Sanada), which leads to so many people getting chopped, stabbed and or shot with disturbing frequency. And then a blind swordsman turns up, played by Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen, who’s also friends with John and the other guy, but he’s forced to kill John’s friends (and everyone else in the vicinity).

So many killings, so many over-designed sets, so many exquisitely choreographed executions. And then there’s the great fight with the large German, which probably didn’t intend to be a ripoff of Colin Farrell as the Penguin in The Batman, but kinda feels like “like The Penguin, but like a Penguin that ate two Penguins” was the thinking at the time.

And that would have been a film for me. But when you subtract an hour and a half from a film whose run time is 169 minutes, yep, you’re left with another aeon to go.

Another film, almost. So John, on his travels, already having killed the entire population of Luxembourg, has thousands more people to kill. I know that everything that I’m saying is the same shit people have been saying since the 2nd film onwards, about diminishing returns, about becoming numbed by repetition, about how it is that they expect us to get sick of how long the slayings go on for, only for it to all the way back around to being “cool” again.

It’s fucking exhausting to have this much movie in your movie. And that’s before the makers seem to taunt us with Wick having to kill another thousand people at the roundabout at the Arc D’ Triumph, before he has to kill another thousand people while climbing up the 220 steps at the Sacre Coeur.

And wouldn’t you know it, after killing so many people, someone grabs him and throws him down the steps again, so he has to painstakingly fight his way up those fucking steps again.

I’ve left out the other gunfight in a decrepit mansion where he has to shoot a whole different bunch of people.

I guess it should be pretty clear that entire sections could have been cut without there being much of a loss of anything, whether it be plot coherence or meaningful time spent watching something. There is a character in this that I am convinced was added in post-production, in that he seems to be another assassin, but he kills other assassins, because he’s waiting for the bounty on Wick to reach an even more insane number. $26mill not enough, well, maybe I’ll kill him for $40mill now. He has scenes at the end of the movie where it’s clear he wasn’t on set, whatever that set was for the final duel that serves as the climax of the film, and his every reaction shot is a facial expression or the raising of a beer bottle in admiration.

Cut him out of the flick, and, well, what would you lose? An assassin with a conscience tasked with killing John, but with complicated feelings about it? You already have the Donnie Yen / Caine character, who also kills a bunch of people who would otherwise kill John. I have no idea whose idea “Mr Nobody” was, but, honestly, maybe there should have been fifteen more second string characters who also want to kill John for reasons of their own but then not really because…

For all my exhaustion, at no stage am I saying that it’s badly done or poorly realised. Keanu is his usual dull, stoic self, and looks exactly as he’s done in the last three Wick flicks, but also looks relieved that he doesn’t have to kill people any more. I haven’t mentioned the actual
“villain”, but Bill Skarsgard, brother to Alexander, son to Stellan, is more than capable of playing a shitty aristocrat member of the High Table that runs the assassin’s world, and to be even more odious, uses a French accent. You feel bad that he can only be killed once.

So the film primes you to care about whether Wick triumphs in the end, whether he manages to kill this one particular chap, but, like in any video game, he has to kill 10 thousand people to get to the boss character. And yet what are we meant to feel as Wick kills jerk after jerk after jerk ad infinitum? Nothing, we are meant to feel nothing, we are just meant to admire the skill with which the set pieces are put together, and the artistry with which the actors, the stunt people and the digital effects programmers execute the endless array of executions, and I guess if you’re that way inclined, this couldn’t be anything less than a triumph.

These flicks are popular, people like them, I begrudgingly like them, but they lose sight of the fact that the reason why the first was so enjoyable was that this retired killer of killers never wanted any of this, and just wanted his car back, and also wanted revenge for his dog being killed needlessly. That led to a cascade set of effects with each flick raising the pointless stakes such that John Wick has by now killed more people than covid. And that’s a few too many people.

There is no vaccine for the Wick, however. I have no doubt they will keep making more of these brilliant / stupid movies, because they can’t stop themselves. Too much money to be made, can’t leave good money on the table. America’s obsession with guns is never going to abate, and programmed drones such as myself will often if not always still respond to a well choreographed scene like the Pavlovian dog that I am.

It’s lovely to see Donnie Yen not playing a stolid, stoic jerk. He plays the character more in arrogant arsehole mode, and I am okay with that. There is no explanation as to how a blind man is able to shoot people with a gun, or where his Daredevil like powers come from. At a guess I would say he’s a nod to the blind samurai Zatoichi character, but who knows? Maybe Donnie Yen is so incredibly awesome that even if he were blind he’d still be able to kill multiple motherfuckers dead.

Maybe he even blinded himself for the role, he is that Method after all. Always lovely to seen Ian McShane, in anything, but especially as this character of Winston. It’s very sad to see the great Lance Reddick here, in one of his last roles before he died. That voice. That tight delivery. That shaved head. Lovely man, gone too soon.

And now we can all rest easy. Wick’s Roma family have been restored to their rightful place at the High Table. The bad people have been dealt with. The assassins, the few that survived, they can crawl back into the woodwork. Caine can go back to whatever it is that blind assassins do when they’re not assassinating people. Maybe he’s a commercial pilot or something, makes about as much sense as anything else that happens here.

And I can go watch something else, like the Succession finale, where there are far fewer deaths, but heaps more pain, and then to sleep the sleep of the righteous, knowing that all that killing was not in vain.

7 times I laughed when Donnie Yen got to kill someone with a pencil for no goddamn reason other than as a callback out of 10

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“Have you given any thought to where this ends? The Table will never stop. You know this. No one, not even you, can kill everyone.” – challenge accepted - John Wick Chapter 4