I’m sure George Miller knew what he had. Sometimes it just takes a while. Miller is the director of all the Mad Max Movies. But with Fury Road, he took everything great about his first 3 movies and turned the 4th into an amalgam of greatest hits…and one of the great movies of the 21st Century. Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves steal George Miller’s template exactly for John Wick: Chapter 4, taking all the great building blocks they used in the first 3 movies and putting them all together in this epic extravaganza.
After the events of Parabellum, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is biding his time with the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), getting healthy and prepping to settle the score with “The High Table.” Wick’s actions obviously anger these powerful people, so they send an operative (Clancy Brown) and one of their own, Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), to deal with the Baba Yaga. Gramont starts by going after people Wick knows: Continental Hotel Owner Winston Scott (Ian McShane) and his assistant Charon (Lance Reddick), Japanese Hotel Owner Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada), and Wick’s old friend, blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen).
Stahelski passed his quiz on his previous John Wick Chapters when building Chapter 4. We’ll get to the action (oh BOY, will we), but let’s start with all the other great stuff this movie has going on, because John isn’t always fighting. The great magic trick Stahelski puts into overdrive in Chapter 4 is all the well executed thought he put into the world the audience is transported into. In this place, assassins have been part of regular culture since the dawn of time. As such, they’ve developed like any millennia old profession: filled with all sorts of rules and bureaucracy that expands across the globe. Each early chapter gave us something interesting: assassin politics/hierarchy in Chapter 1, suit tailoring in #2, and an assassin/religion’s deep relationship in Parabellum. 3 movies worth of world building is blown to epic proportions in Chapter 4, as John Wick does his best Ethan Hunt, globe hopping to various other assassin cultures across the globe to accomplish his mission. New places means new specific cultures to explore, which Stahelski brings in his wicked combination of classy and cool with visceral and vulgar that no one’s really ever attempted before and I don’t think will be replicated with this much success anytime soon. A lot of that success is thanks to an incredible, expanded cast of characters. We have our old standbys like Lance Reddick (RIP, 🙁 ) , Laurence Fishburne, and Ian McShane, as well as wonderful newcomers like Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama, Bill Skarsgard and Shamier Anderson. And anchoring it all is Keanu Reeves, who knows a thing or two about playing a stoic, badass leading man in an action movie franchise.
But as we all know, the main draw of John Wick’s franchise is those incredible action sequences, filled with an amazing combination of gunplay and martial arts. And as good as the first 3 chapters are, Chapter 4 is a Mad Max: Fury Road/RRR level masterpiece of action cinema. The first two major setpieces, one in a Japanese hotel, one in a German nightclub, would be highlights of any movie YEAR, let alone one film. The first is a masterclass on how to combine all sorts of weapons with martial arts, as John Wick goes about escaping a barrage of assassin bureaucrats who want revenge after what Wick did in Parabellum. In this scene alone, we get num-chuks, swords, doorbells, and of course, lengthy gunplay with all sorts of guns across every possible setting inside hotel common rooms. The German scene is more down in the dirt, with each fighter opting for more hands on combat, meaning the hits and falls look like they hurt WAY more to the audience. I audibly gasped a few times and was pulling my hair out with that one. Each of those scenes are incredible in their own right, wordlessly changing styles and locations to keep the audience engaged and on the edge of their seat. But those two scenes were just incredible appetizers. The main course is Chapter 4’s last hour of its epic story, set in Paris. That last hour is forever burned in my memory at this point, sure to be one of the Top 5 highlights of 2023’s movies: just a juggernaut of action of all types, filled with incredibly laid out scenes and fight choreography the likes of which no one dared ever put together before. By the end of the movie, I think I left my own body, enraptured by the euphoria of that insane, incredible, horrifying, visceral, scrumtralescent (basically every adjective possible and imagined), final hour Keanu Reeves, Chad Stahelski, and the John Wick team has in store for audiences. I wanna go to every screening of this movie just so I can watch people’s faces during that last hour, watching them have out of body experiences like I had.
For anyone who says American filmmakers have succumbed to the corporate machine and can’t make interesting big budget movies anymore, make sure you get your tailored suit, take up some martial arts, and drag them to John Wick 4. Movies this creatively rich and exciting don’t come along often, and when one does, it stands out, reminding everyone the possibilities of why we go to see this stuff over and over again, hoping for something like John Wick. Now enough of reading this: go, RIGHT NOW! Somebody just gave John Wick a gun!