"John Wick: Chapter 4": review

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) walks away from a conversation with Caine (Donnie Yen).

[WARNING: major spoilers.]

The double- and triple-taps continue with "John Wick: Chapter 4," the 2023 actioner once again directed by stuntman Chad Stahelski. This time around, the adventure stars Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown, and Ian McShane. In this outing, John Wick (Reeves) is out to free himself from the clutches of the High Table, the supreme authority for assassins in this fictional universe. This circles back to the first movie, in which John Wick had thought of himself as having left behind his life as an assassin, only to be dragged back in after a puppy gifted by his terminally ill wife gets killed by heedless young members of a Russian gang. And John's been back in ever since.

As the story begins, a weird chase scene across desert sands sees Wick eventually in front of a new Elder of the High Table (George Georgiou this time). The Elder warns John that the only escape from his obligations to the High Table is via death, and the rest of the movie drums mercilessly on this theme as wave after wave of assassins comes after John. Wick, despite being nearly friendless, still finds help in strange places. Continental manager Winston (McShane) offers John some advice on how issuing a formal challenge to a personal duel with the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Skarsgård) can be a way out as long as the High Table continues to respect the old ways. Winston has paid a high price for helping John: his concierge Charon (Reddick) is killed in front of him, and the New York Continental is firebombed, effectively leaving Winston homeless. Wick seeks help from old friend Koji Shimazu (Sanada), manager of the Osaka Continental, but the Marquis's minions track John down, forcing Koji and his daughter Akira (Sawayama) to evacuate their hotel and fight. Fighting alongside the Marquis's minions is Caine (Yen), a blind, retired assassin who has been called back into service to kill John. Failure to do so will mean the death of Caine's daughter. Caine kills Koji but spares Akira, who begins to plot her revenge. John, who was friends with both Koji and Caine, is caught in a moral bind. He understands Akira's feelings, but he also knows Caine is only doing what he's been ordered to do for the sake of his own daughter. Along with all this is Mr. Nobody (Anderson), an assassin with a faithful Belgian Malinois. The dog has been trained, like Halle Berry's pooches in the previous film, to attack named body parts, including "balls." Mr. Nobody has a strict ethical code rooted in money: he won't kill John Wick until the price on Wick's head reaches $50 million (Wick starts off at around $14 million, and the price ticks up over the course of the film).

Several obstacles are thrown in Wick's way: the road to his personal duel isn't a straight one. Before he can even be allowed to duel, Wick must be vouched for by a family, which means making amends with his estranged adoptive sister Katia (Natalia Tena). But Katia wants Wick to kill someone first before she'll vouch for him: Killa Harkan (Adkins in a hilarious fat suit), the head of the German Table. Katia demands not only revenge for the death of her father but also proof of death. Conveniently, Harkan sports a memorable set of gold teeth. In a twist, the Marquis claims he has the right to nominate a champion to fight in his stead, so the Frenchman chooses Caine. But because the Marquis is no man of honor, he raises the bounty on John's head to ensure that John is unable to make the prearranged sunrise duel with Caine (the conditions for the duel are: in front of Paris's Sacré-Cœur, with pistols at thirty paces, no quarter to be given, at sunrise). So John must face a final wave of assassins just to be able to make it to his own duel at the end. Along the way, Wick receives unexpected help from Caine himself, as well as from Mr. Nobody. Mr. Nobody's motives and allegiance change after Wick saves his dog from one of the Marquis's assassins—something Wick would have been motivated to do after his own dog had been killed long ago. With this dog-lover bond between the two killers, it becomes hard for Mr. Nobody to assassinate John Wick.

John and Caine do finally face off. In a quiet scene inside a cathedral, before the duel, Caine makes clear to Wick that he still sees John as a friend, but if it's a choice between John and Caine's daughter, then John is a dead man. At Sacré-Cœur, with John and Caine now facing off against each other formally, it's obvious that Caine's blindness is no inhibition for him: he's so sensitive to sounds that the noise of Wick's feet on gravel is enough to tell Caine where Wick is. Neither man wants to kill the other, but here we are. The rule is that, if both opponents miss, they must close the distance by ten paces each, repeating the procedure until one of them is dead. John and Caine deliberately wing each other at first. They close the distance and fire again, with John hitting Caine in the gut, forcing Caine to grunt, "Nice." In the final round, Caine hits Wick in the abdomen, with Wick seemingly mortally wounded. As Wick is lying on the ground, the Marquis, who has been watching from the side, takes Caine's pistol, reloads, and claims the right to deliver the coup de grâce to Wick. Flush with victory, he approaches Wick, but before he can shoot, Winston (who has been Wick's second for the duel), insults the Marquis, calling him an arrogant asshole and noting something the Marquis hadn't noticed: in that final round with Caine, John Wick didn't shoot. Wick brings up his still-loaded pistol and nails the Marquis in the forehead. According to the rules, the Marquis had changed status from mere sponsor to duelist, so technically, Wick won the duel despite having been shot by Caine. This means Caine, his daughter, and John Wick are now all free from the High Table's obligations. The Marquis, who was ambitious but never the top dog, has paid for his egotism and his lack of foresight. Wick, alas, succumbs to his abdominal wound after asking Winston to "take me home." In the final scene, Winston and the Bowery King (Fishburne) stand at the graves of John and Helen Wick, with the King wondering whether Wick ended up going to heaven or to hell. "Who knows?" says Winston, as if he's aware of something without saying what it is. The Bowery King gives a low chuckle. A mid-credits scene shows a vengeful Akira, armed with a knife, approaching an oblivious Caine on a Paris street as Caine watches his daughter play violin.

So the movie's ending leaves open the possibility that John Wick might still be alive, but Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves are both on record as saying that they think John Wick will be taking a much-deserved break for now, and as to whether there might be a fifth installment, well, we'll see. In the meantime, some spinoffs that take place in this weird little world of assassins will be seeing the light of day, and Reeves will appear in flashback.

I ended up with very mixed feelings about this movie. Some parts of it were undeniably awesome, but other parts felt either tedious or overly corny (a problem with all of the films, frankly). It's best to think of the entire John Wick series as movies made by stuntpeople, for stuntpeople, given all the whackadoo fight choreography and nearly surreal gunplay. Keanu Reeves, known as one of the nicest, most unpretentious personalities in Hollywood, is famously a huge fan of stuntmen and stuntwomen (he hangs out with them on set, and he's given them gifts ranging from new watches to new vehicles), so it's no wonder why he's thrown himself into these films with such giddy abandon, and why most of the John Wick cast ends up being a combination of stuntmen and legitimate martial artists. Now, I normally love fight choreography, but this movie might have represented an overdose for me, with so many waves of assassins all coming after Wick and being systematically taken down while Wick himself undergoes punishment that no normal human could ever withstand (such is the way of action films). There are other problems, too, which I'll discuss in a bit.

Despite the overdose, a few action set pieces are worth mentioning. The fight at the Osaka Continental goes through several mood and pacing changes, and in particular, it shows off the skills of Caine, the blind assassin, who can catch arrows in mid-flight when necessary. A fight in the traffic circle surrounding the Arc de Triomphe plays out like a morbid game of Frogger, with enemies trying to reach Wick but being crushed or bounced violently away by passing cars, and with the assassins' cars traveling in the wrong direction on the circle. A fight scene inside a building uses a crawl-panning camera that gives us an overhead view of the action, à la a similar-looking scene in "Minority Report," with John Wick liberating an enemy of a shotgun that fires "dragon's breath" rounds (thus explaining the sudden profusion of dragon's-breath videos on YouTube). These incendiary rounds make one's shotgun belch a powerful burst of flame at the target. In the movie (and this is apparently also true in real life), the rounds instantly engulf the enemy in flames. Lastly, as Wick approaches Sacré-Cœur, he has to fight his way up a final set of 200-some steps. While this scene has a distinctly video-game feel to it, many of the opponents are dispatched in hilariously creative ways.

"Chapter 4" ups the ante by making pretty much all the enemies tough to kill. The previous movie introduced the idea of enhanced body armor requiring someone to aim very precisely at the weak points to score a kill. "Chapter 4" goes all in on both body armor and bulletproof suits that can supposedly absorb and distribute a bullet's kinetic energy with little harm to the suit's wearer. This is, of course, ridiculous in the real world, where even sturdy body armor won't stop you from feeling sledgehammered if you're hit by a round of any respectable power. The thin material of Keanu's and his enemies' "ballistic" suits would do nothing to blunt bullet impacts in real life.

One thing I thought the movie did very well was to give the viewer the sense of an impending execution. There's a scene, near the end, in which John Wick visits a cathedral and lights a votive candle for his wife, then sits and has a talk with Caine, who has followed Wick there. The moment is saturated with a heavy sense of inevitability: yes, John, we're friends, and it's nice to spend a quiet moment together, but in less than an hour, I'm going to have to kill you. There's a return to this feeling during the staircase fight beneath Sacré-Cœur, when Caine helps John fight his way up the stairs to the site of their coming duel.

Except perhaps for Keanu Reeves himself, the actors mostly hit their marks and deliver their lines well. Ian McShane is looking old and craggy at this point in his career, but his expressiveness and incongruously perfect white teeth give him a look of grave seriousness. Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada have both proven their acting chops over and over again, so it's no surprise that they are both respectable presences here. Rina Sawayama was new to me, but she was fine as Koji's vengeful daughter Akira. Shamier Anderson, as Mr. Nobody, is convincing as an assassin with left-field motives. It's always good to see big, burly Clancy Brown getting work in his later years; he makes the most of what is a fairly minor but important role as the Harbinger. Laurence Fishburne, as the Bowery King, gets to deliver some humorously megalomaniacal dialogue, and he's always solid in everything he does. Reeves is, as usual, stiff as a board, with everyone else acting circles around him, but first prize for annoying acting has to go to Bill Skarsgård, of all people. Skarsgård is genuinely talented; I normally like him, but I was thoroughly annoyed by his breathy attempt at a French accent as well as by his floundering attempts to deliver a few short lines in actual French. He pronounced only one thing perfectly in the entire movie: "D'accord," which means "okay." That was it. Otherwise, he sounded more like a parody of a Frenchman, the sort of thing that would probably grate on a French audience's ears. And while we're on the subject of casting, let me note my huge disappointment that Halle Berry was not invited back for this movie. She was easily one of the best things about the previous film (and her part in "Chapter 3" was also too short); the script was at pains to show that her character and John Wick had a long and painful history—a history that had plenty of potential to be mined in a subsequent film. So I missed Berry's feminine presence in this movie.

I do need to reserve an entire paragraph to talk about one actor, though: Scott Adkins. Adkins, a chiseled, muscular brawler in real life, has studied a long list of martial arts, with taekwondo as his base (hence his precise, dramatic kicks). His career in movies began with dumb, straight-to-home-video action movies, but it eventually became apparent that, like the surprising Dave Bautista, Adkins could act! He's played many different roles with his natural British accent, with an American accent, a Russian accent and, in this film, a comical German accent. (He's a villain in the first "Doctor Strange.")  In "Chapter 4," Adkins plays the hilariously fat and sweaty Killa Harkan, who speaks English with a heavy, barely German accent while chortling lustily every other sentence. With Harkan being so fat, it comes as a surprise when he turns out to be a nimble, powerful martial artist who can deliver reverse turning kicks with the force of a tumbling boulder. I was reminded of real-life fatty Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan's friend, who is surprisingly graceful and powerful for someone so overweight. Anyway, Adkins's Killa Harkan was easily the most memorable character in the movie for me. Adkins has said in interviews that he had to practice a lot to be able to perform the card tricks that his character does at the gambling table when John Wick, Caine, and Mr. Nobody meet him. When Killa dies (that can't possibly be a spoiler, can it?), he does so as hilariously as he does everything else. Adkins in a fat suit is cartoonish and incongruous, but the man provides some much-needed comic relief around the middle of the movie. Maybe Adkins should do more comedy.

The story, alas, was full of problems. I think the dialogue could have been smartened up by a factor of ten, for one thing: the John Wick movies aren't exactly known for their witty banter, and it doesn't help matters when characters will respond to a half-witticism with a deep and knowing laugh as if something profound had just been said. In that sense, all of the Wick movies try too hard: they desperately want to convince you of how cool everyone in this world is, but the execution often comes off as merely corny. Wick himself doesn't fire back with smart, cutting remarks the way a Tom Cruise character can, and I wonder whether some lines of dialogue were simply dumbed down to match the speed of Keanu's sodden delivery. No disrespect to Keanu: the man's a superb physical actor, and the screenplay was definitely written in a way to play to those strengths. But whenever Keanu speaks, it still feels too self-conscious, too forced. Also: despite the waves of assassins coming after Wick, it often felt as if there weren't enough assassins. Supposedly, the entire assassin world is after Wick. While it might strain credulity to put so many assassins on screen, a crowd of assassins would at least have made sense for the plot. A third problem was Mr. Nobody: he was a cool character who got the drop on Wick several times but refused to kill him because the bounty was too low—that I could understand. But at the end of the film, he sits there, at Sacré-Cœur, with a front-row seat at John's duel with Caine... but why is he there at all? He had been motivated, at first, by the thought of $50 million for killing John. Then John saved Nobody's dog, and that changed everything for the man, leaving me to wonder... why did Nobody stick around? Simple curiosity? I'll say this: the Nobody character has potential, and if Stahelski does do a fifth installment, I'd like to see a potential friendship between Wick and Nobody explored. It wouldn't be a close, buddy-buddy relationship like Riggs and Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon movies; it'd be two loners who have each other's backs. (And bring back Halle Berry while you're at it!) The movie's cinematography and special effects were also inconsistent. Some effects were amazing in terms of lighting and choreography, but others—like John's "death" at sunrise at Sacré-Cœur—looked like cheap CGI fakery from a video-game's cut scene. Another problem was how the story dealt with crowds and bystanders: you could have all-out brawls and gun battles going on, and bystanders would just keep doing their thing. When Wick fights Killa inside a nightclub, the clubbers just keep on dancing despite the flying fists, kicks, axes, and bullets. At the Arc de Triomphe roundabout, traffic swerves out of the way of the assassins who are after Wick, but despite the bullets zinging everywhere, people don't stop and leap out of their cars: they just keep on circling. What sort of blasé Paris is this? Are Parisians used to assassins attacking each other en masse? Lastly, there's the matter of Winston, John Wick's mentor/father figure who is forced to shoot Wick in the previous movie. Winston is portrayed as an almost godlike being in the second movie, but over the course of the next two films, his stature and power are reduced to the point where he is almost nobody at all—just John Wick's second during the duel. This is a terrible way to treat what had become, by "Chapter 2," a truly awesome character. Winston deserves more respect.

No movie is without flaws, I realize. Overall, I found "John Wick: Chapter 4" to be by turns entertaining and frustrating. This is not my favorite of the four films (that honor goes to "Chapter 2"), but it was action-packed—probably too action-packed. If you're not into stunts, fight choreography, and gunplay, you'll definitely end up battle-fatigued before you reach the film's halfway point. If you're an action hound, though, "Chapter 4" isn't a bad way to spend your time. The series could still do more to flesh out the mythology of John Wick's world, and since "Chapter 4" did remarkably well in theaters, I'm betting that studios will be convinced to bankroll a fifth film. John Wick will almost certainly return.

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ADDENDUM: although he was a flaming woke nutjob in real life, actor Lance Reddick, who died at age 60 after battling heart disease, still deserves a shout-out. A talented actor with an iconic look, Reddick played his Charon as one of the few characters in the John Wick universe who didn't have to try to be cool. I loved Charon's expanded role in the third Wick movie. Reddick died 11 days after the COVID-delayed release of "John Wick: Chapter 4."