The John Wick franchise is more exciting than the Star Wars movies, more imaginative than the Harry Potter films, more cinematic than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and more engrossing than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It earned cult status the right way — not from name-brand recognition like those predictable franchises, but by giving viewers better thrills each time out. In the new episode, John Wick: Chapter 4, dog lover and former hit man Wick (Keanu Reeves) still fights The High Table, the international syndicate he aggrieved. The lone hero goes against several relays of assorted assassins purely for the most spectacular stunts so far.
Chapter 4 is a triumph of consistent style — a rare distinction among blockbusters usually dependent on conventional, imitative effects. Several generations of filmgoers have been so coarsened by dull routine that the unpretentious John Wick brawls directly please their visceral connoisseurship. Each set piece in Chapter 4 goes from dramatic tension to brutal, kinetic climax.
Ever since the advent of Bruce Lee’s kung fu films in the ’70s introduced a particular kind of Oriental physical combat, action-movie fans have become accustomed to increased violence — sometimes with armies of kick-fighting assassins, as in The Chinese Connection. And those routines have been escalated to surreal quantities by video-game fantasy. Chapter 4 takes the nonstop choreography of mano a mano combat, foot chases, car chases, and gun violence to delirious extremes.
After The Matrix, Keanu Reeves refashions the stoic chop-socky hero Neo, but Chapter 4’s real star is director Chad Stahelski, a former stuntman who understands the physics of action, violence, and humor. John Wick could be Stahelski’s alter ego, and each menacing occasion inspires Stahelski’s bravado and ingenuity.
Chapter 4 isn’t sadistic; it’s about Wick’s survival. Reeves perfectly embodies emotionless killing — not an anti-hero, he’s our good-guy — while Stahelski leaves us guiltless, indulging the pleasure of risk and astonishment.
The nearly three-hour running time is excessive (the original edit was reportedly longer), yet Stahelski works like Buster Keaton and the silent-movie comics who originated cinema’s awesome acrobatics — a dazzling car chase around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a fantastic staircase pageant in Montmartre that exposes Joaquin Phoenix’s “Rock and Roll, Part 1” staircase dance in Joker for the tripe it was.
Stahelski’s stuntman erudition (knowledge of movement and its wonder) may explain why the film’s relay-race structure doesn’t feel repetitive. Wick’s adversaries recall a compilation of Bond villains — especially genre veterans Donnie Yen and Scott Adkins, who, along with Wick’s shady allies Laurence Fishburne and Ian McShane, ground the narrative. They provide enough eccentricity to avoid rote responses.
Now that we’ve reached Chapter 4, Stahelski’s gun-play-combat hybrid has been satirized as “gun-fu.” It’s a welcome alternative to the partisan term “gun violence,” which doesn’t mean what it seems to mean but posits a political bugaboo instead of describing social decay. Stahelski’s cynical fantasy doesn’t degrade us like politicians and the prevaricators in our dishonest media do. Chapter 4 distills physical and mechanized antagonism to an abstraction that allows audiences to enjoy the mayhem without feeling the threat of reality and death. But this isn’t fascist filmmaking. Fact is, Chapter 4 definitively disproves the fascist slogan “Speech is violence.”
Stahelski’s Eurotrash nightclub scene, the prelude to Wick’s next gun battle, is so well designed and dramatically crafted that it answers the promise — and disappointment — I felt with that spankingly bright restroom fight scene in Mission: Impossible—Fallout. All this cartoon violence in Chapter 4 is less than my ideal cinema, but there’s a distant relation to right-vs.-might morality. Stahelski also shows us something about our higher sensibilities — the capacity to know that “weapons don’t kill people, people kill people.” He fulfills the primal need to discharge our social frustrations about living in contemporary hell.