John Wick: Chapter 4 is an exhilarating ballet of bullets and opulence
Harry Khachatrian
Seldom has cathartic violence been displayed with the style and sophistication of the John Wick franchise. While the bulk of Hollywood’s recent action offerings compete to showcase louder and larger CGI battles, it’s refreshing to see Wick rarely stray from his reliable 9 mm handgun.
Director Chad Stahelski’s latest addition to the John Wick canon, Chapter 4, picks up where Parabellum left off. Keanu Reeves, playing a bereaved husband and unsuccessful retiree, reprises the titular role of the sharpshooting Baba Yaga. Doggedly pursued by the assassin underworld’s ruling High Table, Wick continues to fight for his life, with an unnerving temperament.
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Delving deeper into its mythical lore, Chapter 4 introduces the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard): the newly appointed head of the High Table and the maestro of its movement to kill Wick. A Parisian art connoisseur with a penchant for the Louvre, the murderous aristocrat exemplifies the franchise’s seamless blending of high society’s opulence with the clandestine world of hit men and contract killings.
Chapter 4 further expands the cinematic universe geographically, taking Wick abroad to the bright, billboard-festooned strip of Dotonbori in Osaka. Japan feels like a natural home for Wick’s aesthetic. The neon-hued cyberpunk motif serves as the backdrop for Wick to exude his skill with katanas, measured by a growing pile of hacked limbs; nunchucks, which Reeves specifically trained to use; and, of course, headshots (lots and lots of headshots). It is here in Osaka that the franchise introduces its newest character: Caine.
Fittingly played by Donnie Yen, the enigmatic martial arts master is a similarly beleaguered gun for hire, yearning for retirement while clinging to his daughter, and begrudgingly carrying out hits at the behest of the High Table to keep her safe. He is best described in one scene by the Marquis as “a man with something to kill for,” in contrast with Wick, whom the Marquis describes as “a man with nothing to live for.” This is the underlying ethos of the gleaming shoot ‘em up franchise. Bereft and seemingly broken, Wick remains an unyielding stoic, choosing to continue fighting, to live in order to, as he explains himself, remember his wife.
Since the franchise’s inception in 2014, each subsequent entry has continued raising the stakes, offering more bombastic set pieces and backdrops for Wick to slaughter reams of mercenaries. It was somewhere in the second film that the bulletproof suit was introduced, making its wearer more tantamount to a superhero than a deft soldier. In Chapter 4, it seems as if everyone has found the bulletproof suit aisle at Bloomingdale’s. As bullets wiz by, belligerents simply hold out their suit jackets and effortlessly evade mortal bullet wounds. The suspension of disbelief walks a fine line between action film and science fiction.
No discussion of the John Wick franchise can omit the dedication and effort Reeves pours into bringing the eponymous character to life. Each scene is meticulously choreographed and honed with surgical precision that leaves little room for doubting Wick’s prowess. While many directors rely on frenzied jump cuts and heavy-handed editing, Wick’s fights are authentic. The way he draws and aims his firearms and the effortlessness and fluidity with which he reloads are paramount to convincing you that he is the best in the business and not some other actor following a script.
With director Stahelski turning up the intensity dial with each iteration of John Wick, each installation aims to outdo the one before. At times, it feels detrimental. Chapter 4 clocks in at a ridiculously bloated, near three-hour run time, dwarfing its predecessors (the 2014 original was almost half that length).
There is a pernicious perception sweeping across film studios that audiences masochistically crave mammoth-length films, so grand and powerful that Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde feels like a tepid operetta in contrast. There are only so many ways to slaughter an entire squad of assassins tactically, and about two hours into the movie, you’ve seen them all. Sprawling across continents, Wick backpacks from Casablanca to Osaka to New York to Romania to Paris, leaving a trail of carcasses in each city. Before long, the recipe begins to feel formulaic and tiring.
But for what it is, John Wick: Chapter 4 delivers on all the same notes as its predecessors. It feels gratuitous to quibble that its greatest shortcoming is that it overdelivers on its most satisfying commodity: Reeves elevating large-scale carnage into an art form.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a computer engineer in Toronto, pursuing his MBA.