Logic dictates a new adventure must be bigger, faster, louder. The fourth time is rarely if ever a charm, and given the way that each movie has successively upped the ante, John Wick: Chapter 4 - the latest and likely last entry - has to bear the burden of serious expectations.
They are the closest things we have to modern-day musicals - less bullet ballets than ballistic Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. There are VFX in the Wick movies, for sure, yet the films’ three-ring mayhem circuses always favor choreography over mouse clicks. You’re always aware that the long-shot/long-take fight sequences, shootouts, knife-fu melees, chase scenes, and stunt-heavy thug sieges are coming to you courtesy of genuine blood, sweat, and tears. Almost as crucially, they rely on the same palpable sense of real physical action being performed by real physical people. Like those blockbusters, the Wick movies live or die on the presence, charisma, and work ethic of a single star (though you don’t feel that Reeves shares the are-you-not- entertained?! death wish as the matinee idol powering the M:I movies). Nine years, three glorious “chapters” and one iconic role later, the saga of the world’s greatest assassin battling fellow death dealers, kingpins, and crime-syndicate eccentrics has established itself as the most reliable film franchise this side of Mission: Impossible. The question wasn’t, “Will this be good?” so much as, “Wait, what year is it again?” Or maybe, “How is this not going straight to VOD?” Nobody was thinking about cinematic universes or career resuscitations or hospitality industries devoted to solely to hired killers.
The inciting factor: Bad guys killed his puppy. But here was the ‘90s posterboy edging into his 50s, playing a hit man who gets dragged back into the life one last time, forced to use his particular set of skills in the name of revenge. Keanu Reeves still looked fit, still wore those slim black suits like a boss, still utilized his signature monotone to suggest stoner-like awe and/or menace. No one could have predicted that a movie burdened with a title taken from the name of its lead character - who is John Wick? Why should we even care? - and that starred an actor who’d been off the public’s radar for a bit, would synthesize a decade’s worth of genre cinema and revolutionize American action movies. Fess up: You had no idea John Wick would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
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