“A man’s ambition should never exceed his usefulness.”
First Screening. Cinemark. I don’t think I'm ready for this review. I just spent three hours watching something that I’m sure competes with Mad Max: Fury Road and Mission Impossible: Fallout as the greatest action film this century (so far). I don’t know how it could ever be topped except in terms of story. First, let’s go through the positives of the film and one very flaw, the narrative.
First and always foremost on any John Wick film excepting the first is and seemingly always will be the fight sequences. One of the most amazing fight sequences ever filmed was the Club Raid in the first film, in which our hero goes level by level through a restaurant / hotel / spa looking for the man who killed his dog and stole his Mustang. Seemingly spare in every action film is the number of bullets per clip, but the first John Wick was very careful to abide by this rule, amalgamating the clip changes into the action sequence as a way of introducing tension. Part Four has two fight sequences that rival that amazing performance: the first taking place at the world-famous Place Charles de Gaulle where the even more famous Arc d’Triomphe stands at the beginning of the Champs-Elysees. This 360-degree fight, involving cars and what must be described as the genuine non-fuckery of Parisian drivers looks like a nightmare to shoot. To put this in perspective, I must bring up a recent podcast in which Olivia Hamilton, one of the producers of Babylon, described the opening party sequence of Babylon, directed by her partner Damien Chazelle. Hamilton, who also has a role as one of the Silent Era’s steadfast and famous directors, put together a shot-by-shot spreadsheet in which every storyboard was labeled, described in detail, and had a list of actors who were in each shot. These actors also had various levels of activity and clothing on, and Hamilton had to distinguish which actor was okay being topless, which ones were consenting to full frontal, and which ones were okay with getting fucked by three guys while being played out on a bronze buffalo living room conversation piece. This spreadsheet had to incorporate dancers, choreography, thus the different levels of dance, and let’s not forget the costumes. It sounded like an absolute nightmare to produce and be the “A.D.” on. Folks, I’m here to tell you, the Place Charles de Gaulle fight scene looked much, much worse in terms of the absolute chaos the line producer and A.D. had to create. To those tireless individuals, I must take my hat off and say, “I respect you.” This being said, if someone were to tell me there was not one frame of CGI in the sequence, I would call you a fucking liar. If that statement comes to be true, then I would proclaim this sequence to be the hardest ever sequence to shoot in terms of the coordination to achieve the measurable visual result wanted. It was simply astounding.
Coupled with this is a second fight scene involving two very novel developments in the same moment: The first is a moving, tracking shot using the bird’s eye view of a five or six room mansion. I didn’t time it, but it appears to be anywhere between five and seven minutes, putting this in the Touch of Evil / The Player territory of being one of the longest shots ever recorded “on film.” The camera moves from room to room as if there were no ceiling, using the walls as barriers between the known and the unknown. The second element is Wick using incendiary powder with twelve-gauge shotgun pellets, a very brutal, nasty way to kill someone developed by the Americans to scare the fucking shit out of Japanese resisters in the Pacific War, and since then banned by international convention. This element introduces shock value hitherto unknown in the film and matches the famous knife throwing fight scene in the third film, which is all I can remember of that particular enterprise. This double element raises the stakes of the scene and elevates what could be a really neat scene to see something play out from a different angle to a terrifying or bad-ass (depending on how you feel about gun control) way to do something that has been done a million times before.
This leads to something that I want to emphasize about the franchise in general and the fourth film in particular: the sets. John Wick films are famous for set pieces, and the set designers I think have been shorted in nominations. The beginning of this film respectfully rips off Lawrence of Arabia by way of edit, setting, and design, and uses a familiar back drop from both that film and Rogue One. From John Wick’s House to the Continental New York, to the amazing Tokyo Continental in this film, Chapter Four excels in set pieces. The only thing better than an amazing fight sequence, as Jackie Chan will tell you, is an amazing fight sequence that takes place in a cool setting (not a backdrop). In this way, Four leaves you satisfied.
The Wick franchise has introduced characters at the pace of one every hour to keep you interested in fresh faces as familiar ones go away. Over time the likes of Geovanni Ribisi and Lawrence Fishbourne have been replaced by Clancy Brown and a shockingly good Donnie Yen. Chapter Four, however, has the Japanese descendant of Tishiro Mifune if there ever was one: the wall of interminable sadness that is Hiroyoki Sanada. Though acting in Japan since he was a child, Sanada burst onto the scene with Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. Though the film mainly focuses on the way more handsome and present Ken Wantanabe, Sanada breaks through the background in an obscure role as an enforcer. Since then, he has matched Wantanabe by paralleling him in the western market. Though Wantanabe continues to get roles like the financial boss funding Leo in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Sanada has given force to roles that don’t have much to go on, including listless characters like you find in Marvel films or otherwise forgettable samurai genre flicks. Sanada here gives purpose to the role, for if you do not believe him, then you will not believe where this movie goes, and that unfortunately is the one place that I feel the film lacks, despite Sanada’s commitment and herculean effort.
The plot is boring. It just is. It has been since Chapter Two. I don’t even remember what that one was – nor Chapter Three, though I remember Angelika Huston shining in that particular effort. The plot is not in the backseat. The plot just does not matter. An in that, the film fails. Now, don’t get me wrong, look at the rating I give it on Letterbxd, I think this is a good, rewatchable film. And in it’s defense I will quote a rather lengthy defense Christopher McQuarrie gave of Mission Impossible Fallout when that film premiered in the UK on the Empire Podcast. McQuarrie’s argument was just and inconquerable. Who cares what you are after as long as you’re along for the ride. He quoted Bond films that he could not recall the plot of and said it was ll regrettable but, you know, not really important. But that helicopter chase at the end of Fallout? Everyone will remember that.
This, I take issue with. I think McQuarrie is wrong. I am a James Bond fan, and I have seen all of those films' multiple times – perhaps twenty or thirty or so per film. I know Goldfinger isn’t after the gold. I know Kananga just wants to peddle heroin using fear. I know Moonraker is an elitist supremacist and I know the black-market scheme in Octopussy, even if you don’t. The McGuffin in MI3 is not important, true, but what is true is that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is so morally deranged that whatever the Rabbit’s Foot is, he shouldn’t have it. Rogue Nation is about an organization of disavowed spies using their talents to get rich – kind of like Spectre in From Russia with Love and, well, Spectre. This being the case, I know Chapter Four is about John Wick attempting to be free of “the Table” (read Spectre for organized crime gangs of Eastern Europe) and its’ odious responsibilities. But, and this is the big gap here, the film did not sell it to me. In a huge, tense, opening sequence in which Fishbourne sells the living shit out of the plot (or tries), Wick turns to the camera and says...” yeah.” I’m not expecting pages of dialogue, but a little moist cheek action or a bit of ‘what am I going to do now’ is really what this film needs. I understand the pain the character is going through; this is my fourth Wick film. But the motivation is spare and the reasoning even less so. The film suffers for this. It reminds me a lot of the third Bourne film, which I love like all the others, but which gets quite repetitive. Bourne goes to a different country to find information, gets tracked down, kicks ass, repeat. That happened three times per film. In this series, there are three huge fight scenes per film, lasting about 30 minutes (which is insane by modern action standards). Although the other 30 minutes is considered down time, most of the tension ramps up through this period and leads to the next action sequence, so really you only get about 5-10 minutes or rest. Perhaps they were worried about the run time, but I suspect nothing was shot, or less, nothing was written, that would solve this issue. John Wick is John Wick is John Wick. You’re not paying for plot. And I think relying too much on the action is a mistake.