The Wickening
In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: "what we're up to here is just as good as Keaton". And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski and his extraordinary team of stunt artists proved that, in fact, that was true. In 2023, John Wick: Chapter 4 doesn't quite open with a direct reference to the second-most famous cut in the history of film editing,* from Lawrence of Arabia, when Peter O'Toole blows out a lit match in close-up, and then there's a perfect graphic match linking the now-extinguished match head and the sun rising above the horizon. But it puts that reference within the first five minutes, and once again, there's seems to be a bit of swagger behind it: "oh, so you think that was a great multi-hour epic about a man who wanted very much to die if it would take away the pain of living, but he couldn't do anything with that fact, so instead he turned it outward and waged war on the entire world until it destroyed him? Well, check this out!" And this time around, I do not think that Stahelski, or writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch, have quite lived up to their braggadocio. That is my hot take: John Wick: Chapter 4 is not as good a film, nor as robust a tragic narrative, as Lawrence of Arabia.
And that really is just about the worst thing one can say about the film that caps off what I think we have to regard, at this point, as the best and most-consistent action franchise in American cinema history. The next-worse thing I can say is that John Wick: Chapter 4 is 169 minutes with credits, and it really doesn't need to be; the first of its three main sequences probably indulges itself a bit more than is strictly necessary (it very neatly divides into segments based on location - Osaka, Berlin, Paris - though I'm not sure that they're equal thirds. In truth, despite grousing about the running time just there, I wasn't actually really aware of time passing during the movie). Basically, the opening sequence feels very much like John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum; Part 2, and it's not as good at doing the same things - fights in white, glassy art galleries - as Chapter 3 was. But then, that sets the bar unbelievably high, and to a certain extent, I think it's a deliberate strategy in Chapter 4 to start off on a slightly weaker footing. All the better to steadily escalate across all of those same 169 minutes. It is remarkable, even miraculous, that a film this long, with this many action sequences, manages to be almost constantly accelerating: I don't actually know if it's strictly true that literally every single setpiece is more audacious and inventive than the one preceding it, but that's certainly the impression the film gives - at any rate, its most extraordinary moments are very much backloaded, and that was a nice surprise after it had convinced me that the middle was surely going to be the most extraordinary part. The last two major sequences are definitely the best: first, the pinnacle of this series' "slapstick comedy as brutally violent action" (or is it "brutally violent action as slapstick comedy"?) mentality, a bravura display of hold-nothing-back stuntwork, with a few choice long takes, letting the camera hang back to soak it all in; then, when it feels after all of that, there cannot possibly be a way for the film to throw more stuntmen at a more remarkable setting, with more effective and kinetic camera blocking, Chapter 4 essentially concedes that no, there cannot, so instead for the grand finale, we're just going to carve things down to the bone for a scene of pure one-on-one tension, clearing out all of the grandiosity for a scene of gutwrenching suspense driven primarily by cutting between medium shots when we just desperately want to see a nice wide shot again to gauge where two characters are relative to each other. And all of this is all the more extraordinary in light of the fact that the wild, pull-out-all-the-stops extravagance of that penultimate sequence is built around the high-stakes question of whether or not a man will be successful in climbing up an entire flight of stairs. I could go on; there are many immaculately-staged fight scenes shot with the artfully gloomy sheen of a very expensive glossy magazine, and I loved basically all of them. There's a fight around and through some kind of indoor rainstorm fountain that I would have said, as soon as it was done, was the single best action scene in any film since the last Mission: Impossible, and it doesn't end up making my top three action scenes in this same film.
It's all tremendous stuff, very much the culmination of the John Wick thing: bright colors, sleek and fashionable locations in world-class cities, extraordinary fight choreography with some wildly energetic camera movement that both shows off the choreography, and also acts as lavish, excessive showmanship in its own right. There is a crane shot (or perhaps it is a drone; if so, it is the steadiest drone in the history of the world) that rises up to look straight down on the fight as it moves from room to room, like tracking naked mole rats as they scurry around the chambers in a museum display; it's officially a video game homage (it was inspired by 2019's Hong Kong Massacre, a by-most-accounts unengaging knock-off of 2012's Hotline Miami), but describing it that way doesn't at all get to the thrilling expansiveness of the perspective. It lets us mentally map out the path of one of the best gun-fu action scenes in English-language cinema history, in clean, swift lines of movement that can be followed and anticipated. For something unabashedly gimmick, it's downright elegant.
And it's also the culmination of the series in that it seems to very deliberately want to function as a summary and greatest hits album; the opening third is basically a revised version of Chapter 3, I have said, and the middle third feels to me like an attempt to remake the first John Wick in the elaborately Baroque style that the series hadn't developed yet at that point. The whole movie is filled with vague and extremely specific references to its three predecessors.
It's also actually trying - and actually succeeding, I am surprised to say - to serve as the grand emotional finale to a series that I haven't actually thought of as "emotional" since about midway through the first movie. Basically, the movie takes a step back to look at the sum total of John Wick's (Keanu Reeves) arc over the four films - an arc comprising, what, maybe a couple of months of in-universe time? - and explicitly rethink this all as a personal tragedy. Once there was a man whose wife died, and he wasn't ready to deal with that in an appropriate, healthy way, so he went on a rampaging, daring the world to kill him dead. That's kind of the whole story, stretching across all these movies, and it's broad and simple in ways that match extremely well with the big aesthetic gestures of the film, and with Reeves's performance style. He's not, I hope it's uncontroversial to say, an especially gifted actor at the level of doing nuanced, detailed character work, but he's superb as the malleable canvas for a film to play at operatically-scaled Epic Feelings, and there's a severity to his work in Chapter 4 that I haven't seen in the earlier films, where he's mostly playing an ill-tempered badass. It's more wrathful and weary, aided to no small degree by the aging Reeves has done in the almost nine years he's been playing this role. It's all pretty blunt, but it works - there are movies that cry for nuance, and movies that brusquely declare "this is the Primordial Emotion we are dabbling in", and the X-Treme Melodrama that John Wick: Chapter 4 indulges in is exactly the right fit for something this visceral and hyper-stylised. It's a big, po-faced cartoon; let it have thunderous emotions.
At any rate, the film is a wild, overstuffed ride, piling on elaborately overcomplicated storytelling beats (though it's less consumed by mythology than Chapter 3) and sharply-etched side characters, all of them vivid in their arch, declamatory ways, most of them performed by people great enough at this kind of cod-mythic style to keep Reeves propped up, and that is of course what we want from side characters (returning co-stars Ian McShane, the sadly late Lance Reddick, and Laurence Fishburne - having a hugely fun time, to all appearances, in big triple-decker ham sandwich of a performance - are joined by a terrific bunch of newcomers: Donnie Yen is certainly the best in show, playing melancholy blind swordfighting assassin, but Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama, and Shamier Anderson are all excellent additions to the cast, the latter two both new faces to me). It's elaborate, monumentally silly nonsense, served up with great sincerity but no sense that this is anything other than big goofy fun; that has always been this series' strength, but now there's much more of it, like when you cut yourself a slice of cake that's twice as thick as it should be. Slightly disgusting and stomach-rotting? Maybe. But some of us really like cake.
Reviews in this series
John Wick (Stahelski and Leitch, 2014)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Stahelski, 2017)
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Stahelski, 2019)
John Wick: Chapter 4 (Stahelski, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*The most-famous is, of course, the cut from the bone to the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And that really is just about the worst thing one can say about the film that caps off what I think we have to regard, at this point, as the best and most-consistent action franchise in American cinema history. The next-worse thing I can say is that John Wick: Chapter 4 is 169 minutes with credits, and it really doesn't need to be; the first of its three main sequences probably indulges itself a bit more than is strictly necessary (it very neatly divides into segments based on location - Osaka, Berlin, Paris - though I'm not sure that they're equal thirds. In truth, despite grousing about the running time just there, I wasn't actually really aware of time passing during the movie). Basically, the opening sequence feels very much like John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum; Part 2, and it's not as good at doing the same things - fights in white, glassy art galleries - as Chapter 3 was. But then, that sets the bar unbelievably high, and to a certain extent, I think it's a deliberate strategy in Chapter 4 to start off on a slightly weaker footing. All the better to steadily escalate across all of those same 169 minutes. It is remarkable, even miraculous, that a film this long, with this many action sequences, manages to be almost constantly accelerating: I don't actually know if it's strictly true that literally every single setpiece is more audacious and inventive than the one preceding it, but that's certainly the impression the film gives - at any rate, its most extraordinary moments are very much backloaded, and that was a nice surprise after it had convinced me that the middle was surely going to be the most extraordinary part. The last two major sequences are definitely the best: first, the pinnacle of this series' "slapstick comedy as brutally violent action" (or is it "brutally violent action as slapstick comedy"?) mentality, a bravura display of hold-nothing-back stuntwork, with a few choice long takes, letting the camera hang back to soak it all in; then, when it feels after all of that, there cannot possibly be a way for the film to throw more stuntmen at a more remarkable setting, with more effective and kinetic camera blocking, Chapter 4 essentially concedes that no, there cannot, so instead for the grand finale, we're just going to carve things down to the bone for a scene of pure one-on-one tension, clearing out all of the grandiosity for a scene of gutwrenching suspense driven primarily by cutting between medium shots when we just desperately want to see a nice wide shot again to gauge where two characters are relative to each other. And all of this is all the more extraordinary in light of the fact that the wild, pull-out-all-the-stops extravagance of that penultimate sequence is built around the high-stakes question of whether or not a man will be successful in climbing up an entire flight of stairs. I could go on; there are many immaculately-staged fight scenes shot with the artfully gloomy sheen of a very expensive glossy magazine, and I loved basically all of them. There's a fight around and through some kind of indoor rainstorm fountain that I would have said, as soon as it was done, was the single best action scene in any film since the last Mission: Impossible, and it doesn't end up making my top three action scenes in this same film.
It's all tremendous stuff, very much the culmination of the John Wick thing: bright colors, sleek and fashionable locations in world-class cities, extraordinary fight choreography with some wildly energetic camera movement that both shows off the choreography, and also acts as lavish, excessive showmanship in its own right. There is a crane shot (or perhaps it is a drone; if so, it is the steadiest drone in the history of the world) that rises up to look straight down on the fight as it moves from room to room, like tracking naked mole rats as they scurry around the chambers in a museum display; it's officially a video game homage (it was inspired by 2019's Hong Kong Massacre, a by-most-accounts unengaging knock-off of 2012's Hotline Miami), but describing it that way doesn't at all get to the thrilling expansiveness of the perspective. It lets us mentally map out the path of one of the best gun-fu action scenes in English-language cinema history, in clean, swift lines of movement that can be followed and anticipated. For something unabashedly gimmick, it's downright elegant.
And it's also the culmination of the series in that it seems to very deliberately want to function as a summary and greatest hits album; the opening third is basically a revised version of Chapter 3, I have said, and the middle third feels to me like an attempt to remake the first John Wick in the elaborately Baroque style that the series hadn't developed yet at that point. The whole movie is filled with vague and extremely specific references to its three predecessors.
It's also actually trying - and actually succeeding, I am surprised to say - to serve as the grand emotional finale to a series that I haven't actually thought of as "emotional" since about midway through the first movie. Basically, the movie takes a step back to look at the sum total of John Wick's (Keanu Reeves) arc over the four films - an arc comprising, what, maybe a couple of months of in-universe time? - and explicitly rethink this all as a personal tragedy. Once there was a man whose wife died, and he wasn't ready to deal with that in an appropriate, healthy way, so he went on a rampaging, daring the world to kill him dead. That's kind of the whole story, stretching across all these movies, and it's broad and simple in ways that match extremely well with the big aesthetic gestures of the film, and with Reeves's performance style. He's not, I hope it's uncontroversial to say, an especially gifted actor at the level of doing nuanced, detailed character work, but he's superb as the malleable canvas for a film to play at operatically-scaled Epic Feelings, and there's a severity to his work in Chapter 4 that I haven't seen in the earlier films, where he's mostly playing an ill-tempered badass. It's more wrathful and weary, aided to no small degree by the aging Reeves has done in the almost nine years he's been playing this role. It's all pretty blunt, but it works - there are movies that cry for nuance, and movies that brusquely declare "this is the Primordial Emotion we are dabbling in", and the X-Treme Melodrama that John Wick: Chapter 4 indulges in is exactly the right fit for something this visceral and hyper-stylised. It's a big, po-faced cartoon; let it have thunderous emotions.
At any rate, the film is a wild, overstuffed ride, piling on elaborately overcomplicated storytelling beats (though it's less consumed by mythology than Chapter 3) and sharply-etched side characters, all of them vivid in their arch, declamatory ways, most of them performed by people great enough at this kind of cod-mythic style to keep Reeves propped up, and that is of course what we want from side characters (returning co-stars Ian McShane, the sadly late Lance Reddick, and Laurence Fishburne - having a hugely fun time, to all appearances, in big triple-decker ham sandwich of a performance - are joined by a terrific bunch of newcomers: Donnie Yen is certainly the best in show, playing melancholy blind swordfighting assassin, but Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama, and Shamier Anderson are all excellent additions to the cast, the latter two both new faces to me). It's elaborate, monumentally silly nonsense, served up with great sincerity but no sense that this is anything other than big goofy fun; that has always been this series' strength, but now there's much more of it, like when you cut yourself a slice of cake that's twice as thick as it should be. Slightly disgusting and stomach-rotting? Maybe. But some of us really like cake.
Reviews in this series
John Wick (Stahelski and Leitch, 2014)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Stahelski, 2017)
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Stahelski, 2019)
John Wick: Chapter 4 (Stahelski, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*The most-famous is, of course, the cut from the bone to the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
