Spoiler warning for John Wick 4
There’s a moment in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:John Wick 4 where Keanu Reeves spends several minutes fighting up a seemingly endless flight of cobblestone steps. Dozens are murdered in his pursuit, only for our hero to reach the top and immediately be thrown back down. The only time we are able to take a breath from this onslaught of action c๊omes as our hero tumbles down the staircase, knowing that in a few precious seconds he’ll pick himself up off the ground to do it all again.
Donnie Yen helps hi🅷m up, and the two butcher countless more as the stairs transform into a battleground once again. It’s spectacular, and a true achievement in action filmmaking, yet it also makes me yearn for a time when set pieces in this series stood out instead of blend🐲ing together into a singular mass of homicidal brilliance. John Wick 4 is exceptional, but it also runs the risk of feeling bloated and much too obsessed with its own complicated mythology.
Perhaps this excessiveness is the entire point. Given how the film concludes, this could well be the last we see of Keanu Reeves as the character now his twisted journey of revenge has come to an end. He ea𓄧rns his freedom from the High Table, collapsing in a heap on the stairs of a Paris churchyard, his dying mind hallucinating his late partner. No more blood is to be spilt except his own, and for a film that hinges on bloodshed to give itself relevance, to have it all come to an end on such a sombre note is welcoming.
John Wick 4 is long, coming in at just under three hours as it introduces countless new faces and layers🅘 to an already convoluted world, never stopping to explain how its characters are hopping across the planet or gaining access to resources that should be impossible. You are meant to sit back and let the ludicrousness wash over you, grinning gleefully at all the bloodshed while ignoring how the world has a seemingly endless source of assassins and seedy European nightclubs for the Baba Yaga to wreak havoc within.
The film reaches a crescendo roughly two hours in and then keeps on going, seldom giving you a chance to process the majesty of each new sequence as another is thrown at ꦉyou without warning. It is endlessly inventive and ruthlessly violent, packing more kills into this sequel than any of the previous three movies combined. One moment plays out like a video game as the camera pans upward to give us an obstructed view of an🎀 abandoned flat.
We can see where John Wick and his opponents are as we’re invited to predict exactly how this explosion of murder will unfold. Imagine the scene in El Camino where Jesse Pinkman searches the apartment for a stash of money and combine it with roughly 30 deaths and an endless supply of flaming buck shots, and you’re right on the money. Like I said, it’ꦗs brilliant, but big character moments and narrative twists are awkwardly interspersed with the action instead of standing out from it.
There’s a new dude simply known as ‘Tracker’ who spends the entire film hunting Wick down for the right price, only t🎃o suddenly develop a conscience when John decides to save his dog from being killed. Donnie Yen and Rina Sawayama play big enough characters as it is, and I’d rather spend time with them than waste an entire arc on a man who only exists to showcase that John is a good man beneath the bloodbath.
John Wick 4 is a great film, and it could have achieved excellence if it existed on a more granular sca🐽le or understood the equal importance of intimate moments and bombastic bouts of action for stellar character development. This is the second film in a row that follows the entire world hunting after a single man, and you can only express that scale convincingly for so long until it falls apart.
Aside from a stunning action sequence set amidst the Arc De Triomphe, all the murder feels like an inconvenient obstacle to Wick rather than a series of triumphant v🀅ictories. 24 hours removed, and all the moments I remember are ones grounded by emotional heart or stakes that felt real. Half the world wants him dead, but John still has friends so loya𓃲l that they’re willing to bring their own lives to an end if it means repaying the debts they owe.
The scenes where we’re forced to watch knowing only one will emerge still breathing will always hit harder than endl🐲ess mobs of goons who only exist to be obliterated, and John Wick 4 has so many of them that it borders on comical. 🌺We have reached the end of the road now though, and any films or spin-offs that follow in the footsteps of this fourth entry can’t do anything but scale things back for the better. All this beautiful murder has its place, and I’ll always adore it, yet earlier films gave it more significance. If the future of the John Wick universe provides any chance of earning that back, I’ll more than welcome it.