I have never intentionally planned to watch a John Wick movie. That said, I have also never switched away from a John Wick picture once I found myself tuned-in.. These ultra-violent ballets of mayhem are irrationally entertaining -- although you decry your complicity in the endless choreographed violence on-screen, you can't exactly look away either. For better or worse (mostly for worse I suppose), these films make compelling viewing. This is fascinating because there is nothing in them but flashy sets, impressive locations that soon become strewn with bloody corpses, and hours of improbable fighting: Keanu Reeves as the titular hero stalks around with various weapons (samurai swords, 9 millimeter Glocks, shotguns that fire bullets that explode into flame on contact, sharpened pencils, nunchucks, pointy throwing stars, as well as assorted long guns, revolvers, dueling pistols and random pieces of cutlery, bricks, shards of glass, chopsticks, and other junk picked up along the way and converted into lethal armaments) killing everyone in sight. Sometimes, he shoots adversaries down at long range. At close-range, he tends to pummel them with his pistol, using it like a fist, before firing a bullet or bullets into his enemies mouth or ear or forehead. When he runs out of ammo, Wick beats up armies of attackers with his spent weapons; sometimes, he takes hostages, holds them as human shields, and, then, blasts away at the platoons of charging henchmen with the hostage's own gun. If he has to, Wick simply beats his enemies to death with his bare fists, snapping their necks and long bones like twigs. Often he gets thrown out of windows, falling forty or fifty feet to smash parked cars with his vertebrae -- this stuns him a little, but he, then, jumps up usually never the worse for wear. The body count of assailants shot, hacked down, pitched off high prominences, run over by cars, battered to death by weird martial arts hardware, eaten by savage dogs, or burnt alive is literally innumerable -- a rough estimate can be calculated by this formula: 7 to 10 casualties per minute for about 100 minutes of on-screen combat (in a film that is maybe 150 minutes long: this yields, by my best estimate, between 700 to a thousand people killed by John Wick. (This index of carnage does not include incidental victims, people assassinated by bad guys, Wick allies who end up dead, and bystanders caught in the crossfire-- probably about another 75. With all this mayhem, the picture has no time for humor, characterizations, conflict (other than mass murder), romance, or anything else. Wikipedia summaries of these films, imply that they have complex plots -- it's intricate sometimes, I suppose, to identify who is killing whom among the multitudes of villains dispatched by the hero. But there is, in fact, no narrative to speak of -- the films, particularly the nihilistic John Wick: 4, are just absurdly violent set-pieces strung together on a scaffolding involving international travel and bombastic ritual performed by professional assassins -- the killers belong to secret societies that are like an Elks Lodge or the Freemasons. John Wick who slaughters everyone while neatly clad in a black suit and tie has no identity other than as an instrument of mass destruction -- some of his guns seem to have more character than he does. He has no friends, no romantic attachments, no appetites other than for revenge and murder -- there's no suspense because he wears Kevlar-infused garments, can't be killed or, even, seriously wounded, and is implacably efficient in slaughtering everyone else on-screen. A few of the villains are particularized in the manner of the bad guys in old James Bond movies (folks like Odd Job in Goldfinger for instance); whenever, a bad guy is given a character trait it's pretty clear that he's doomed to death in the next ten minutes or less. When I was a child, I used to lament that the battle scenes in movies were too short and the build-up to the violence too extensive, long, and elaborate. What would a movie be like that was nothing but violence? The first example of a film of this kind was Cy Enfield's Zulu (1964), a picture that dispenses with scene-setting and plot after about forty minutes to simply indulge itself in protracted and spectacular blood-letting. Zulu, at least, had the excuse that it chronicled, more or less, a real battle, the siege at Rorke's Drift in South Africa. John Wick: 4 brings to fruition my childhood fantasy of a movie that is about nothing but well-choreographed murder -- it's compelling, as I have noted, but pretty much deplorable on many moral grounds. Nonetheless, the picture is alarmingly well-made and, if you watch for five minutes, you will be hooked by the addictive spectacle of acrobatic slaughter.
John Wick is a professional assassin, a member of an occult guild of murderers called The Table. There's no point in watching the first 15 minutes of a movie like this -- those are the scenes that set the plot in motion except that there is no plot: Wick is a just a weapon and something needs to trip his trigger. (In the first installment, a bad guy killed his dog, providing a basis for Wick to slaughter four or five hundred villains. I think that Wick had a wife once was also killed by a bad guy, a casus belli inducing a mini-battle of the Somme. I don't know what exactly motivates Wickin this fourth iteration of his saga -- but it doesn't matter. Whatever he has done or suffered is enough to unleash extravagant chaos on four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe and North America). In the fantasy world of Wick movies, the professional murderers assemble for drinks and trysts and lodging at special luxury hotels where an uneasy truce is maintained -- with this many scorpions in a bottle, maintaining the peace is a difficult thing. For some reason, the manager of the New York murder-hotel is summoned to a glistening, sci-fi tower in midtown Manhattan where his concierge is gunned down, but the hotel operator spared. This tutelary execution is accompanied by the high explosive implosion of the assassin-motel. Legions of bad guys are dispatched to locate and kill Wick who is hanging out at a Japanese murder hotel. In the first extended set-piece, Wick slaughters several hundred villains in vast palatial halls that resemble the amenities of a hotel as much as an oyster resembles a dove. There are subterranean passages, endless arcades of a arched columns, terraces bedecked with blossoming cherry trees -- most of the action takes place in dim light so the seams between reality and CGI are hard to detect and so that we can't observe the substitution of body doubles for Keanu Reeves playing John Wick -- the actor has grown a little long-in-the-toot for the gymnastics of this film.. During this preliminary scene of butchery, two additional characters are introduced -- a man named Cane who is totally blind yet a formidable warrior (he is a rip-off of the blind swordsman Zatoichi in the popular Japanese movies) and a "tracker",that is a bounty hunter with an avuncular blue collar demeanor who trots around with a sniper rifle and his Doberman pinscher, a dog that the killer characterizes as his "emotional support animal"; when the bounty-hunter barks out "nuts!", the dog obediently rips off the testicals of his owner's enemies. The tracker is planning to kill Wick but only when the bounty on his head reaches a figure greatly exceeding the "20 million USD" pledged as payment for the killing of the hero. (You will be pleased to know that there is a special market with a big blackboard on which bids for assassinations are announced and offered to the armies of murderers among us; this market is serviced by half-naked tattoed if comely damsels who scurry around buying and selling futures in homicides.) After the battle at the Japanese hotel, Wick hurries to Berlin, a bastion of sinister Russian and Mitteleuropaische assassins. To buy his way back to the "Table", he has to kill a huge barrel-chested mobster with golden choppers. The mobster is ensconced in a night club populated by about 5000 orgiastically dancing lounge-lizards -- it's some sort of mega-rave with thunderous techno music booming over the dark dancehall equipped with giant waterfalls a bit like the Niagaras at the 9-11 memorial. After a preliminary exchange of insults and threats, Wick guns down about thirty of the mobster's supernumeraries and, then, battles the big fellow on the dance floor among obliviously prancing club patrons -- they seem to be a CGI phantoms and couldn't care less about the carnage underway in their midst. This is followed by a weird, gratuitous ritual in which Wick and the female Russian gang-leader scarify their forearms with some sort of seal of criminal insignia, an emblem that is supposed to give Wick the authority to kill the big boss who is hiding in Paris. Wick, the, goes to the City of Light where he confers with the owner of the Manhattan murder hotel at the Louvre -- all the shots are posed against huge paintings such as "The Wreck of the Medusa" and "The Death of Sardanapalus". Why they are meeting in the silent and still main gallery of Louvre is unclear to me, but it makes for some luscious visuals. Wick has challenged the big boss to a duel, that exercise to be conducted at the Church of the Sacre Coeur located, as we are told, 222 steps above the Moulin Rouge. Wick has to get to the duel by dawn -- if he's late, he forfeits and will be killed for a good measure. The next half-hour is a homage to Walter Hill's The Warriors with a Black French radio announcer calling a play-by-play on the action -- we see only her large lips and the microphone in huge close-up and she plays appropriately aggressive mood music while the battle takes place. By this point, Wick is worth 40 million dollars and hundreds of burly assassins hit the Parisian streets to kill him. There are several spectacular set-pieces including a scene involving hundreds of cars whirling around the traffic circle at the Arc de Triomphe. There are long takes, including one extended murder-fest filmed from above in a continuous shot following Wick as he runs around what appears to be computer game location blasting away at this enemy with a shot-gun that is also some sort of flame-thrower. Wick reaches the steps leading up the Sacre Coeur and there's a twenty minute battle as the hero climbs the steps shooting and bludgeoning bad guys on every step. At the summit, all of the principals are gathered -- Cane, the blind swordsman, the bounty hunter and his dog, the aggrieved manager of the Manhattan murder hotel, and the big boss. Wick fights his duel with antique dueling pistols and the film ends in a radiant blaze of sunrise over the City of Light.
The movie is weirdly exorbitant -- for instance, the cherry blossoms in Osaka and the giant paintings in Louvre. It's all very grandiose and utterly silly. I suppose that for its type, this movie couldn't really be bettered. It represents the ne plus ultra of first-person shooter movies, a computer graphic come to spectacular life. You have to admire the craft required to make a thing like this -- particularly during the Covid pandemic when the movie was produced. It's totally pointless and has almost no relationship to anything in real life -- in fact, I suspect that the majority of the cannon-fodder assassins are CGI and don't exist in any form but numerical.. But if you tune into this thing, you will be hooked and will watch it with increasing dismay and admiration to the bitter end.
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