Movie Review: John Wick: Chapter 4

The opening scene of John Wick: Chapter 4 finds John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the underground training facility of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), the only assassin in this ever-expanding world of assassins who was willing to help John after he was labeled “excommunicado” by the High Table. John is getting ready for his ultimate revenge against the High Table, looking healed, strong, and angry, as he takes his aggression out on a wooden training dummy. The Bowery King brings John a newly pressed Kevlar suit and asks, “You ready, John?” John simply replies, “Yeah,” in a way only Reeves could deliver. The Bowery King proceeds to light a few candles and blows out the match and then, in edit straight from Lawrence of Arabia, the film cuts instantly to a Moroccan desert where we find John, in the black suit riding a black horse, chasing three men on white horses with a gun.

From there, John Wick: Chapter 4 does not slow down once during its nearly three-hour-long runtime. It is a globe-trotting action spectacle that takes us to Morocco, Japan, Berlin, and France. It features characters we remember from the first three films, like John, the Bowery King, Winston (Ian McShane), and Charon (the late, great  Lance Reddick), and introduces us to several new ones like Marquis (Bill Skarsgard), a senior member of the High Table and the man responsible for hunting John Wick for the High Table, Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin hired by Marquis to kill John despite being a friend of John’s, and Tracker (Shamier Anderson), an up-and-coming assassin who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. The fight scenes are bigger and more violent, and the body count is so high it seems uncountable.

A lot has been made about the fight scenes and action in the John Wick franchise. From the first time we saw John Wick mow down a dozen highly trained henchmen by himself, we have all been enamored watching John take down any number of assassins and henchmen at one time in violently creative ways. There will most definitely be a buzz around the fighting and action in John Wick: Chapter 4, as it features some of the most inventive kills and fights in the John Wick franchise and in action movies over the last decade.

But what I was thinking about while watching John Wick: Chapter 4 was not how amazing the action scenes were but why they were amazing. Seeing nameless henchmen has been fun to watch since the early James Bond films, but what is it about the John Wick franchise, particularly John Wick: Chapter 4, that elevates these scenes to the pantheon of action scenes?

The first thing is rather obvious, but it’s Reeves. The ageless fifty-nine-year-old star of the Wick franchise gives his best performance in the franchise in Chapter 4, but also gives his most muted in the series. Wick is out for revenge and determined to get the “excommunicado” tag removed from his name, no matter how many people he has to take out in the process. Wick will make requests like, “I need a gun,” but otherwise doesn’t say too much throughout the film. But Reeves’s performance is a stunning piece of physical work. He doesn’t need words to express what Wick is going through, he wears it on his face and in his body language. Anger, desperation, and exhaustion are evident in every scene. In the fight scenes and action scenes, Reeves moves with the grace and skill of an experienced dancer. You never feel like he is counting his steps to hit his mark, but that he is just naturally moving with action and executing the right moves just as Wick would. This is the kind of performance that gets overlooked by awards bodies and most filmgoers, but it is as good as any performance in Reeves’s career.

Director Chad Stahelski, a former stunt double for Reeves on the Matrix films, and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dan Laustsen are the other keys to why these action scenes are as good as they are. John Wick: Chapter Four features over 100 minutes (it may be more) of exhilarating action and having a man familiar with stunt work running the show has proven beneficial. Stahelski knows we want to see the action. We don’t want a lot of rapid editing and we don’t want to see close-ups of the characters. We want to see the characters in long shots that aren’t cut every second. Stahelski and Laustsen do a masterful job of doing just that. Whether it’s John fighting what feels like fifty men at once or a one-on-one fight with the comically large and menacing Killa (Scott Adkins, in the best scene of the movie), Stahelski and Laustsen keep the action in the frame and allow us to see every bone-crushing hit and every bullet shot. Where Reeves is like a skilled dancer, Stahelski treats these fight scenes like musical numbers in a musical. With every fight scene, he knows when to focus the action, when to pull the camera out to show a wider scope, and he knows when to make the proper cut. They are scenes filled with tension, comedy, and awe, and each one has its own story to tell within the larger scope of the film.

Laustsen’s lighting and usage of color a striking visual flair to the film and there is an ariel tracking shot in the film’s heart-stopping, thirty-plus-minute climax where we see John mowing down dozens of men in different rooms in an abandoned mansion that has my jaw on the floor. Laustsen’s outstanding work should be remembered at year’s end.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is action filmmaking at the highest level. It continues to build this underground world of assassins and tell John’s story while also featuring some of the best fight scenes ever seen on screen. It’s the biggest and best of the John Wick franchise and one of the great action films of the last decade.

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