John Wick: Chapter 4 Review: Keanu Reeves’s Assassin Kills Again in Marvel-Sized Sequel

If anything, the film proves that John Wick is doomed to further Marvelization.

John Wick: Chapter 4
Photo: Lionsgate

Chad Stahelski’s original John Wick thrives on simplicity. Its efficient narrative whisks us along from set piece to set piece, barely stopping to take a breath for a moment of plot and character development. Its elemental setup—bad dudes kill the wrong man’s dog, full stop—demands only that an onslaught of increasingly skilled villains be served up for legendary hitman John Wick (Keanu Reeves) to knock down and finish off with a headshot.

With each subsequent John Wick film, though, Stahelski and company have further expanded the world in which the series is set, exploring the inner workings of the council of crime lords known as the High Table and the various rules and consequences that regulate behavior in specific settings and situations. They’ve continued to add new fetishistic objects as signifiers of broad ideas—honor, loyalty, professionalism, you name it—as well as flashier sets. And in this gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.

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John Wick: Chapter 4 rounds out at 169 minutes, more than an hour longer than the first film. While this may suggest a more expansive raison d’être, the filmmakers have merely surrounded the epic set pieces for which the series is known with skirmishes between new characters that feel like filler, as well as lengthy, pompous conversations about friendship, death, honor, and how the High Table should be run. Chapter 4 does see martial arts legends Donnie Yen and Scott Adkins fighting John Wick for the first time—and the pair are involved in two of the three best fight scenes—but it also spends an inordinate amount of time spinning out Wick’s backstory and further building out the already needlessly convoluted mythology of the series.

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As for the set pieces that fans of the series have come to expect, they certainly aren’t in short supply. But while some of them are fresh, particularly a prolonged showdown outside the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, there are a couple of sequences that feel like conspicuous rehashes of similar moments from the earlier John Wick films. There’s yet another neon-drenched art installation in which Wick busts up more baddies and another neon-drenched club scene that sees, well, more of the same. Meanwhile, the addition of another dog-loving assassin, Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), is little more than a callback to the first film in the series.

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Save for the fight on the steps up to the Sacré-Coeur, whatever could be called unique here can be traced not to the expectedly innovative choreography, but to the slew of new characters who exist only to further develop the lore of the series. Indeed, Chapter 4 is so replete with talk of rules of excommunication and reinstatement, as well as plans to condemn buildings, that it often feels like fan fiction geared toward anyone obsessed with the nuts and bolts of an organization and world that were never designed to be so complicated or deeply scrutinized.

Ironically, Chapter 4 is as much a film of its time as John Wick was a rejoinder to the Hollywood of its time. Back in 2014, Stahelski’s stripped-down film, as it followed its all-action-no-talk hero’s lurid killing spree, felt like an antidote to so many Hollywood action films that, to this day, are needlessly bloated, convoluted, and packed to the gills with mediocre CGI.

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While Stahelski and Reeves have been coy about announcing whether a fifth John Wick film will happen, this one’s obsession with broadening the series mythology sets the terms of that inevitability. That a TV prequel all about the Continental is set to land on Peacock later this year only demonstrates that the series is doomed to further Marvelization, as the pointless minutiae that served merely as background details in the earlier films is now taking center stage alongside the series’s penchant for stylish, over-the-top vengeance and competing for our attention.

Score: 
 Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Ian McShane, Marko Zaror, Natalia Tena  Director: Chad Stahelski  Screenwriter: Shay Hatten, Michael Finch, Derek Kolstad  Distributor: Lionsgate  Running Time: 169 min  Rating: R  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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