John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Killer’s killer John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still attempting to somehow defeat the killer cult hierarchy known as the High Table, after begging for his life didn’t really work out for him in the third movie. Because he’s murdering goons and higher-ups like nobody’s business, the new Marquis (Bill Skarsgård) is trying to get rid of him with particular enthusiasm (and while speaking with a dubious accent that’s apparently meant to be French). This guy’s even less subtle than his predecessors, so destroying Winston’s (Ian McShane) hotel because he didn’t betray John well enough in the last film, and murdering Charon (Lance Reddick, who will be missed in real life around here) is only the beginning of what will turn out to be sending yet more hordes of goons after John.

Goons, as well as John’s old friend, the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), in what is probably supposed to be an attempt at psychological warfare. John for his part might just stumble upon a plan of his own. Don’t worry, it involves the only thing he’s really good at.

I was really nonplussed with the pointless circle jerk plot of the third John Wick, and didn’t particularly enjoy most of the action in it either, so I didn’t go into Chad Stahelski’s sequel expecting much of anything from it. My low expectations were considerably exceeded, and this very long, probably final for now, part of the franchise turned out to be very good fun for me. Even its rather excessive length doesn’t really keep this one down: while it might be cut by fifteen, twenty minutes, for most of the time, the epic length of any given action set piece in here is rather the aesthetic point.

For this is a movie that’s burning to make you see every single moment of choreography, every movement stuntmen make, every improvement the effects crew makes to their imperfect humanity, so it’s showing you all of it, not caring one whit if the audience becomes as exhausted as our protagonist. Camerawork and editing often feel genuinely influenced by arthouse cinema of the Slow Cinema style, Stahelski finding a nice angle and then slowly panning through the action, or rising towards the ceiling – in this case probably not to say something philosophical about the nature of humanity but to show off as much as possible in what I’m tempted to call Slow Maximalism. In many of the set pieces, the feeling of physical forward momentum comes exclusively from what stunt people and actors and post-production achieve. The camera’s just there to watch. That this works out for the film as well as it does is a compliment to everyone involved in these departments, and that Stahelski makes it work demonstrates an astonishing absence of directorial ego (which in this context may have something to do with his roots in stunt work).

At this point, the series has also become adept at filming around  Keanu’s specific weaknesses as a screen fighter, and often make him look as good as the earlier films in the series said he is.

Otherwise, this has some of the most fun archetypes of the series. The great Donnie Yen’s joyfully played morally complicated blind assassin is the obvious stand-out here, but Rina Sawayama makes a much better action heroine than you’d expect from a pop star, and Shamier Anderson’s backpacking tourist-styled tracker with a dog is also simply fun to watch interacting with the rest of the cast.

Add to this the film’s moments of genuine weirdness – like Scott Adkins in a fat suit as a German gangster who gets it in pretty bizarre nightclub fight – and it’s pretty difficult to resist the charms of John Wick, Chapter 4.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following the events of the last John Wick, our hero, sensitive mass murderer John Wick (Keanu Reeves, upon whose greatness as a person I am now apparently bound by law to sing an ode, even though he’s still not much of an actor, which seems to be rather more relevant to me when talking about him, you know, acting) is on the run, hunted by the same goofy cabal/cult running the international underworld he murdered oh so many people for. If the end of the second John Wick suggested to you that John has a plan to somehow fight back against The High Table, during the course of the film you’ll learn that he really hasn’t one apart from seeking the overlord of his now-enemies to…beg him to take him back in. Whoa.

On the plus side, on his way to there (and back again), dear John is meeting up with various old and new acquaintances (among them Halle Berry doing quite a bit of dog-based gun fu) and killing a whole lot of people in front of very sexy looking backgrounds.

So yeah, if you expected the actual story of Chad Stahelski’s third John Wick movie to go anywhere, you might very well be disappointed on finding the whole plot of this third film could very well have been squeezed into the first half hour of the fourth John Wick film, for all the way it moves the not-so epic story forward. It sure doesn’t help the plot that John is quite so much of a one-trick pony, never actually learning anything, never really changing, and so when he actually tries something different, he seems to make his new choices at random. People (and I am sometimes one of them) make fun of automatic Hollywood character arcs often enough, but for John Wick as a character, that would be an actual improvement.

However, while not much of actual import happens (John killing hordes of people is by now such a given pretending it might mean anything is preposterous), the film goes further in its direct predecessor’s attempts at building a cartoonishly-goofy yet also irresistibly baroque world made out of conspiracy theory, comic book ideas about organized crime that make the Kingpin’s organization seem plausible in comparison, and often eye-popping aesthetics. I do sometimes wish the film would use this world for more than creating mere backgrounds for its fights as if it were a level-bound videogame, but them’s the breaks.

Speaking of fights, the action sequences are of course the actual reason for the movie to exist, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, the series by now having progressed to a stage where animal-loving John inducing a horse to back-kick his enemies to death seems perfectly logical for the world it takes place in. It’s obviously silly as hell – I’m expecting he’s going to throw adorable killer puppies at his enemies in the next film – but presented with so much verve – often style, too – that it’s pretty difficult to not be on board with this sort of thing. Also damn great are Halle Berry’s dog kennel fighting style, and all kinds of absurd flourishes in nearly every action scene. The least impressive of them is probably the grand finale that sees John fight against a scenery-chewing Mark Dacascos, which depends a bit too much on an audience not noticing how awkward and stiff Reeves looks when compared to his sparring partner. But hey, at least John has been shot, beaten and cut so much at this stage, his slowing down and doing martial arts like Keanu Reeves does make some sense.


So, while John Wick 3: Electric Boogaloo is not quite as great fun as the second film, it’s also not the annoying waste of time the first one was, and still a very entertaining bit of movie videogame violence. Perhaps the fourth John Wick film will even get around to having a plot?

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

The killerest of all killers, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) murders a whole bunch of Russian gangster led by Peter Stormare using the same crappy Russian accent (note to producers: people in Sweden have a language of their own you might know as Swedish; it’s not Russian, perhaps on account of Sweden not being Russia) he puts on in American Gods because they stole Wick’s car and the picture of his dead wife in it.

Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), apparently the guy in the giant crime conspiracy that seems to control everything in these movies who allowed Wick to retire from the killing biz with said wife, sees this as a signal that Wick has come out of retirement. Seeing as Wick has a ritual debt to him these murder clowns call a Marker, Santino presses our “hero” to murder the gangster’s sister (Claudia Gerini) for him because she has inherited the family seat at the high table of the giant criminal conspiracy he’d rather have for himself.

Wick declines, so Santino blows up his house (and apparently all photos of his wife, because Wick seems not to know about the digital world). Afterwards, Wick changes his mind, pretty obviously planning to kill the sister and pay his debt and then give Santino his mind (in form of a bullet or a hundred) about blowing up his house and his photos. I probably don’t have to explain the rest of what happens in the film.

I love big dumb action movies as much as the next guy (the cheap ones probably much more than the next guy) but I didn’t really warm to the first John Wick. Mostly, if I remember right, I found the film’s all-out action attack rather exhausting with too many moments of the film showing off instead of letting the action flow naturally. I’m also pretty sure that film’s idea of what’s cool and mine are very different ones. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to me that I rather liked the second film in the series, despite it being directed by the same guy in Chad Stahelski and written by Derek Kolstad again.

Well, I thought the prologue with Wick murdering the Russians was just as annoying as the first John Wick, but afterwards, I very quickly found myself warming to a film that clearly has fun adding somewhat bizarre flourishes to the gangster secret conspiracy bits of the first movie. It’s obviously all very comic book-y, but in a way that works well as a backdrop for a film whose hero is deadly with a pencil (not to speak of guns) and that features exalted characters like Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King, a variation on the old beggar king concept, or scenes like a shoot-out in an art exhibition/cabinet of mirrors.

Unlike in the first film, this John Wick doesn’t seem to feel the need to try so hard to demonstrate how cool and loud and so on it is, so there’s even time for several ten minute blocks where nobody gets shot (or stabbed, or exploded – you get the drift) which the film uses for some fun additions to its over the top world. The characterisation and dialogue is still over the top too, of course, but that fits the context here well, too. The action itself I like much better this time around. Things haven’t become any less spectacular and physically dubious, but Stahelski’s direction seems much more clear and focused, without ever losing a sense of excitement and unironic silliness. The videogame influences on the action are much less shoved into the viewer’s face, too. As a matter of fact, Chapter 2 suggests that you can indeed use elements of third person shooters in an action movie in interesting ways.


So what’s not to like? It’s fun, it’s violent, it’s over the top without being annoying and even Keanu seems to be awake most of the time.

Three Films Make A Post: Crawling, Slimy Things Terror-Bent on Destroying the World!

Preservation (2014): To my surprise, I found myself quite taken with this new variation on the old, old theme of people (in form of the excellent Wrenn Schmidt) having to unleash their inner beast to defend themselves against other people hunting them through the woods. At first, the film seems a bit talky and smug, but soon enough director Christopher Denham demonstrates a nice eye for mood, and all-around inventive yet subtle direction, and the film becomes pleasantly ruthless.

Sure, there’s little that’s new here, but Denham executes particularly the scenes taking place after the hunted has become the hunter™ very suspenseful, always ready to surprise with a minor twist on the formula or just a particularly well executed example of it. That’s really more than enough to keep me happy.

John Wick (2014): Take one painfully miscast lead actor, a bunch of great but underused character actors, dialogue so painfully stupid not laughing seems utterly impossible, some cool action scenes, just as many action scenes that are by far not as cool as they obviously think they are and go on and on and on and on, obnoxious loud music playing obnoxiously loud, and you have Chad Stahelski’s application for the job as the new Neveldine/Taylor or perhaps the new mid period Luc Besson. The resulting film is at times inadvertently funny (seeing as it concerns Keanu Reaves’s bloody vengeance on the Russian mobsters who stole his car and killed the little dog his dead wife gifted him from beyond the grave), at times actually exhilarating if stupid, and at other times painfully annoying in its permanent attempts at overstylizing everything and at overselling Keanu’s supposed badassness.

Dark Summer (2015): About half of Paul Solet’s film is a fine, subtle ghost story centring on ideas about love, desire, and the inability to get these things to work in a way that isn’t messy among teenagers, with two excellent lead performances by Keir Gilchrist and Stella Maeve and direction that makes a virtue of the film’s limited means. Alas, the other half – at times running in parallel to the good parts - is working hard to undo that good work with way too much stuff about black magic, eyebrow-raising twists, and the sort of scenes you put in your film when you don’t trust your audience to stay awake if you don’t shout at it “look, I’m a horror movie!” from time to time. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out too well for the film as a whole.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,horror,action,wrenn schmidt,christopher denham,chad stahelski,keanu reaves,paul solet,stella maeve,keir gilchrist