“You’ll run out of bullets before they run out of heads.” Winston (Ian McShane with ascot)
For John Wick: Chapter IV, the heads keep rolling, mostly decommissioned by the titular assassin’s preternaturally accurate gun, and partly because it seems everyone now wears a bulletproof jacket often used as a shield. Hence the efficiency and necessity of one or two shots to the cranium. And very little blood, which I don’t miss at all, given that, like sex, I don’t need more than a glance to get it.
As with most cinema, even impossibly successful runs like this thriller juggernaut, it’s about storytelling even when it’s about beautifully-choreographed fight sequences that mix martial arts with high-end weaponry that includes a “dragon’s breath shotgun”! The story is as old as movies themselves: global corporate hoodlums, The Table, are after assassin John Wick, a wicked former employee. The rep is the smarmy Marguis (Bill Skarsgard), decked out in three-piece suits, the brighter the better, and cravats louder than Winston’s (thank you costume designer Paco Delgado).
Wait till you see the wild-ass fight on a lengthy set of Parisian stairs or sit across from Killa (Scott Adkins, a martial arts expert), an almost sumo-sized card dealer. His metal teeth take us back to a memorable menace in the James Bond canon.
It's all very stylish, no doubt because of returning director Chad Stahelski’s penchant for colorful neo-noir and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch’s ability to take the fantasy into new/old motifs such as a duel that Clint Eastwood would approve. They also supply lines like “Second chances are the refuge of men who fail” in a film where memorable dialogue is not what the audience expected.
Who would expect set pieces such as combat in the Louvre and around the Arc de Triumph? Or better, who has a budget to afford those glories? Well, the producer of one of the most lucrative crime thriller series in cinema history that takes us to Germany, Japan, and France with ease.
I can’t predict if Keanu Reeves will return, he with a fortune now probably greater than Croesus’ (I hear Reeves is generous with his wealth), because one of the great lines from John‘s Japanese friend, Shimazu ( Hiroyuki Sanada), in this murderous ballet is “Have you given any thought to how this ends?”
I have, and I hope it returns if it has more of the absurd style and beautiful ballet peppered with dialogue as sharp as the swords that dispatch very sharp baddies. John Wick: Chapter IV is as good as the best action films we will see all summer, and that bountiful crop has yet to start. Stay tuned.
John Wick: Chapter 4
Director: Chad Stahelski (John Wick)
Screenplay: Shay Hatten (Army of the Dead), Michael Finch (Predators)
Cast: Keanu Reeves (The Matrix), Laurence Fishburne (Apocalypse Now)
Run Time: 2h 49m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
