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John Wick: Chapter 4

​Only the dumbest of fucks doesn't grok that you can absolutely have too much of a good thing. You may love pizza, heavy metal, and threeways with big titty goth girls and well-hung Hungarians, but after a month of eating nothing but 'za, listening to nothing but Metallica, and banging away in your weirdly specific menage a trois, you'll be begging for a steak, a little Mozart, and some one-on-one missionary.

People have been shouting, "Too much!" at the John Wick franchise since the second flick. With the latest entry, John Wick: Chapter 4, they're finally right. If I'm being perfectly fucking honest, even I, a lover of action movies - the more creative and chaotic the violence the better, felt myself getting a little numb about three-quarters of the way through the last one, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum.

Chapter 4 consciously slows things down, including 20 or 30 minutes of people actually talking without anyone getting shot, stabbed, choked, burned, impaled, or thrown off a building, but this is still a Wick flick, which means it's basically one long fight scene. All the non-action bits succeed in doing is extending the runtime to an inhumane three hours.

Beyond the action overkill, this franchise really shot itself in the foot when it started buying into its own bullshit. The first movie was a surprise hit back in 2014 because its story was simple and strong. It starts with some assholes killing the puppy that was John Wick's (Keanu "Whoa" Reeves) last gift from his beloved, deceased wife. John Wick then proceeds to take gory, glorious revenge on said assholes.

Compare that to the opening of Chapter 4. Wick kills the Elder, ruler of the High Table. A Harbinger arrives at the Continental to tell the Manager that he has one hour - measured by an ornate hourglass, natch - to go see the Marquis. Look at all those fucking capital letters! This movie is more full of itself than an ouroboros.

Don't get me wrong; there's still a lot to like. One sequence shot entirely from above as Wick kills his way through room after room of a building is the utter definition of beautiful brutality. But when everything is capital letters serious, and everyone is bulletproof, it makes you miss watching a guy take out motherfuckers with one shot - or a pencil - just because they killed his dog.

June 23, 2023