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jkhoylman
Reviews
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
The candle that burns twice as bright, burns twice as long
Quick paced, almost to an excess, John Wick: Chapter 4 never ceases to entertain. The franchise has spent three feature-length films up to this point reaching the precipice of being so ridiculous as to be indistinguishable from surrealism. This was, of course, inevitable as soon as sequels started getting churned out. There's no realistic way to bump up the action, since you started the first one at 100%. You can't fake the tension here. Once you throw a certain challenge at the protagonist, the audience knows they'd almost certainly win under any similar circumstances, because they won mostly by skill and relied little on luck to succeed. So the only way to create new tension is to throw more guys at him, give the bad guys bigger (read: better) weapons, or put him at a worse disadvantage. What makes 4 so enjoyable is that every so often it will take a second to acknowledge that in films that followed the franchise's beginning as a pseudo-parody of gritty, "realistic" action thrillers, which tried to show us that battles between groups of professional assassins would be ruthlessly efficient and well executed, rather than over the top and macho, they have themselves become worthy of parody, and delights in it.
"Oh so John can just challenge a High Table member to a duel and then he will be able to be free of The Table? And we can use it to fix all of his, and Winston, and Caine's problems?"
"Yeah but first John needs to get back into his family (see John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum) so that he can challenge the dude to a duel legitimately. So now he's got to go to Berlin and kill people"
"Alright, let's go kill people"
A blind, retired, Wick-level assassin that's an old friend of Wick's and is also coerced into killing Wick (read: special people)? Hell yes! A Mexican standoff that is resolved by a hand of poker, which is itself of no importance other than to show off character personalities and deliver dramatic and thematic monologues (the situation was actually resolved, of course, by killing people)? Hell yes! There is even a top-down sequence with fire-bullets which makes it feel even more like a video game. And every time there's this little moment where they almost say "hey watch what we're about to pull" to let you know they're in on it. They want you to laugh at it.
Lots of killing people, loved it.