REVIEW: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’
John Wick: Chapter 4 opens with an homage to the most famous shot in Lawrence of Arabia, as Laurence Fishburne blows out a match in New York and the movie slam-cuts to a shot of the desert in North Africa. Director Chad Stahelski is making an announcement here: The little B-movie he made in 2014 called John Wick,about a grieving suburban widower and retired mob assassin who takes revenge for the killing of his dog, has birthed an epic. The second and third installments of the franchise took Keanu Reeves’s John Wick out of New York and into Europe and Asia and Morocco in search of more people to kill. But the sheer scale of John Wick 4 dwarfs those lesser sequels in impact and jaw-dropping effect. Not only that, it pretty much dwarfs any other action movie made in the past 10 years aside from Mission: Impossible—Fallout. In that sense, it more than earns its claim to David Lean-like filmmaking.
This movie is much, just a little shy of three years, like Lean’s other great movies. In contrast to Lean’s movies, this is a crazy then with so many dead bodies that Quentin Tarantino might possibly remark,” You know, that might be too much.” However, Wow is the only appropriate comment to this. I’m not a big fan of hyper-violence, and this is one of those movies, but I can tell when something is being made with superb cinematography. I didn’t even glance at my watch again.
Additionally, it completely transforms the original John Wick outside out. The main drawback of that unexpected film wasn’t just Stahelski’s masterful staging of the hand-to-hand fight scenes, which eschewed the quick-cut conflict of Michael Bays fight scenes in favor of a Gene Kelly / Fred Astaire eloquence that shows you every move, twist, and change the way you can see the actual dancing body in an old MGM musical. It was also the change it took about an hour to discover that the murderer John Wick is a seasoned agent in the covert community of robbers, murderers, and criminals that coexists peacefully with our own and is housed out of the fancy hotel known as the Continental. The second John Wick movie was still about a man and his dog, as well as the idiotic son of the Russian gangster who was going to pay for what he did to the doggy, even though that mythical world was just great fun and strange.
John Wick 4 is all mythology, and I don’t know if you’d be able to make sense of the Continental world if you haven’t seen any of the others. But who cares. When people aren’t fighting, John Wick 4 is just gorgeous to look at no matter where you are—Osaka or Paris or Berlin or the Gobi Desert. And when they are, you just sit there with your jaw dropped in amazement. There’s a staggering sequence set on a series of outdoor staircases, which Wick has to get to the top of, and he keeps getting waylaid again and again.
And the only thing I want to argue about the film’s main attraction is that it happens at night in a well-known Parisian location. You have never seen anything like it, which involves vehicles, motorcycles, trucks, and walkers.
As per usual, Reeves gives his acting — if you can call it that— here a kind of hypnotic woodenness. In the whole image, he utters about 50 words and hardly speaks or alters his expression. Reeves, however, makes a distinctive screen presence in these fights— or at least he engages in much of them to show his dedicated physicality. And he is surrounded by a variety of excellent bright performances, including Bill Skarsgrd as the film’s title character, John Wick show former Ian McShane( best known as Al Swearengen in the beautiful HBO show Deadwood ), Hiroyuki Sanada as his rival in Japan, and the dead hotel supervisor in New York. Additionally, Shamier Anderson, who plays a new-generation John Wick and will probably anchor the second access in the company if one is made, introduces us to the burgeoning new star.
Of all, one will be created. Exactly what am I saying? This is going to be extremely profitable, and it should be.
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