Film News

Tripwire Reviews John Wick Chapter 4

Published

3 years ago

March 25, 2023

Admin

Time To Close The Book

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at John Wick Chapter 4, out in cinemas now. Warning: a few spoilers ahead…

John Wick Chapter 4
Director: Chad Stahelski
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, George Georgiou, Bill Skarsgard, Ian McShane

The saga of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick began back in 2014 although the original film’s release took a little while to reach UK cinemas. So nine years later and hours of gratuitous deaths and injuries leads us to the fourth film in the John Wick story.

When the first film was released, it was a sleeper hit. No one knew much about it and it felt like a decently inventive action film which was paced well. So inevitably Hollywood, always happy to jump on a bandwagon or milk a successful property to death, decided to give us not one or two but three sequels to John Wick.

Each sequel has increased the running time of every successive film. The first one was a lean 1 hour and 36 mins, John Wick 2 was 2 hours and 2 mins while the third film clocked in at 2 hours and 11 mins. So of course the fourth film in the series is 2 hours and 49 mins. The box office for each film has been climbing each time so there is a reason as to why the series has continued but sometimes I wish the film industry isn’t purely motivated by dollars and cents.

John Wick: Chapter 4 opens with our eponymous hero chasing after a number of Arabs on horseback to track down the Middle Eastern head of the High Table and seek revenge on him. There are no opening credits and the audience is thrown directly into the action. The opener was shot in the Wadi Rum in Jordan, the same place where David Lean shot some of his Oscar-winning Lawrence of Arabia. The intro does look fairly beautiful but that is where the common ground with Lean’s masterpiece ends.

Wick is still a pariah in the organisation and here we are introduced to the Marquis, played by Skarsgard, a man whose mission it is to humiliate and discredit Wick before dispatching him. So he seeks out everyone who has offered the assassin succour over the years while also humiliating his friend Winston (McShane) by stripping him of his New York hotel and murdering his concierge played by the now late Lance Reddick.

So a cat and mouse game begins between Wick and The Marquis, taking things to an incredibly silly and vapid final battle which sees John Wick face off against fellow murderer for hire, the blind Caine (Donnie Yen), who has been retained by the Marquis, so he can free himself from the yolk of the High Table. Laurence Fishburne is back as The Bowery King, there to count his money here.

Keanu Reeves as John Wick and Donnie Yen as Caine in John Wick 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Bill Skarsgård as Marquis in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

I realise that expecting any kind of nuance from a franchise like John Wick is obviously a bit of a tall order but there really is no reason for this film to be nearly three hours long. There are moments of visual flourish as there were in the three predecessors but the increasingly Looney Tunes style violence where we see one of the antagonists put down with lethal force apparently four times before he is actually finally stopped in his tracks becomes more and more grating. John Wick now is an unkillable superhero in a fashionable suit, who can survive a high dive onto a van from a great height and bouncing up and down an insane amount of stone stairs in Paris’ Sacre Coeur with nary a scratch.

Ian McShane as Winston, Lance Reddick as Charon, and Clancy Brown as Harbinger in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Lance Reddick as Charon and Ian McShane as Winston in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Keanu Reeves as John Wick, Donnie Yen as Caine, and Scott Adkins as Killa in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close

John Wick Chapter 4 is an amped up video game film which is far too long with a fairly paper-thin plot and very little characterisation. There are moments which work like the extended battle in his friend Shimazu Koji’s hotel in Osaka, played by Hiroyuki Sanada which is a pretty impressively orchestrated action sequence but in the main, John Wick Chapter Four could have done with a heavy edit to make it less of a bloated live action cartoon. But the bottom line is that John Wick didn’t need any of these sequels really as the first one would have stood on its own as a standalone film. Just like that other Hollywood franchise also starring Reeves The Matrix, the filmmakers didn’t know when to leave things alone. The world they have created with organisations like the High Table is an interesting one but John Wick and his adversaries are not engaging enough to offer enough drama for four films. Fans of the other films will see this film regardless but by the end of its excessive running time, I was bored and waiting for it to end. His story is resolved here but no doubt there will be a return to the world he inhabits in the future. The only real saving grace is that Reeves does have real screen presence here as he has done in the three progenitors. John Wick Chapter 4 is a stylish but ultimately empty exercise in logistics.