John Wick 4 Movie Review: Even less plot, even more running time, even more beating. John Wick is back and is radicalized: the order of the game takes from the foundations of the past but becomes something else compared to what we were used to. Chad Stahelski remains in the director's chair, while the screenplay is the first time that the creator of the franchise Derek Kolstad is not there - Shay Hatten and Michael Finch instead. We will see it in this review of John Wick 4, the new chapter dedicated to Baba Yaga swells yet is reduced to the bone. Everything changes to change even less.
John Wick 4 Plot:
When we left him at the end of the third film, John Wick (the indispensable Keanu Reeves) had just landed after a long flight from the top of the Continental Hotel. There he had taken some bullets in the chest. It was Winston (Ian McShane) who shot him, but to save him from the clutches of the Grand Table. Now, however, John has found a way to take revenge on the order and definitively free himself from the grip that oppresses him.
Things, obviously, aren't quite as he hopes. Yet another dark figure comes into play, the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a recently elected member of the Grand Table because he has been tasked with hunting down and eliminating the wanted murderer once and for all. A manhunt begins across the globe - Osaka, Berlin, Paris, with New York cornered - where everything falls even further into darkness, where every turn presents an obstacle that John must overcome to grasp the destiny that he is longing for.
The stage of the world:
The great strength of the John Wick saga has always been the ability to weave charisma through the exposition of the context. Of course, the clashes with bladed weapons and fire glue the screen in front of us, but it is in the care of the construction of everything from which they arise and in what they fall into that the value of this franchise lies. John Wick is the vector that guides in a codified universe, rigorous, and punctual in developing itself through rules to be respected and rituals to be performed.
John Wick 4 squeezes this world-building awareness to the max. It's an exaggerated film, almost three hours long. Much of the time is spent working on the staging of a world that seems to adhere even less to the one we know than in the past. The world of John Wick, that of occult societies and orders of assassins, is a world that takes shape in its very existence, in its existence.
For this reason, the spaces of a new chapter that is reduced to the bare bones appear to be real museum environments. The collections in display cases at the Hotel Continental in Osaka, the live performance architecture of the club in Berlin, and the empty Louvre, for the use and consumption of these souls of the night. The world of John Wick is no longer, as it was previously disguised, a place to travel. Rather, it is a geometry on which the work of art is set up, the video art of the clash, of martial kinetics choreographed to the rhythm of electronic music that underlines every blow and shot.
There is only Baba Yaga:
Within this philosophy of the world as the very substance of the John Wick universe, it is John Wick himself who is reduced, to further strip down his role, his thoughts, and even his playing time. Not that Keanu Reeves' character has ever shone with three-dimensionality (after all, that wasn't what he was called to do), but now he compresses himself into a minimal black point. New fascinating characters take up space from him, such as the aforementioned Marquis, the director Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada), and above all Caine, a Donnie Yen in the role of an assassin of the Grand Table who curiously takes up a role as a blind fighter after Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Little remains of John Wick. Some people will say, “There's no John Wick out there. There is only the murderer." Once we arrive here, there is only Baba Yaga, theorization of the assumption of revenge, of a specter consumed by his mission which is useful for the film to discuss the radicalization of this chapter. All that remains to infest this museum are the sets, characters, and choreographies that are increasingly pushed to the limit, increasingly verbose, and increasingly exasperated.
The radical culmination of a saga:
John Wick 4 changes everything to stay the same as before. Indeed, to become even more in line with what has been his assumption since the beginning. Reconciling the substance (the incessant, repeated, relocated clashes) with the form (the rites, the spaces, the commandments) to sculpt the mythology, engrave in stone an imaginary where the whys and hows are at most punctuation, not propositions.
A film for this reason is also made of wide angles ready to welcome as much "world" as possible into the frame, to let its characters enter from the sides and have them meet in the center. John Wick 4 is the pinnacle of a way of understanding a saga by working courageously only on its pillars, thinning out everything else, and paradoxically expanding, even at the cost of being too much, of exhausting and crashing. However, at the end of such a successful saga, what an ambition.
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