Tick, tock, Mr. Wick.”
When last we left unhappily unretired professional killer John Wick (modern noir god Keanu Reeves: Destination Wedding, A Happening of Monumental Proportions), he had just been given a one-hour head-start on his excommunication from the global assassins’ guild he is a member of, along with the laying of a contract on his life that will be too big for anyone to let pass. He was in big trouble.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (“prepare for war”) picks up right there as Wick limp-runs around a neon-slicked New York City nighttime downpour in that final hour, chasing down some macguffins that might help him survive this. He was injured in that last bust-up in Chapter 2, the one that has gotten him exiled. So he’s starting out already beaten up and not in optimal shape, and he needs all the help he can get if he’s gonna make it out of this alive. But wait: Will he make it out alive? Is this gonna be one of those movies where the “happy” ending, or at least the most dramatically satisfying one, will be the one where the hero dies? It doesn’t seem unlikely at all, and it lends a frisson of looming antiheroic tragedy to everything we endure here.
And what a ride it is! Even before Wick’s 60-minute reprieve is up, he is fending off colleagues overeager to collect the bounty on him. And once the countdown is over: oof. New York City is suddenly ground zero for an all-out assassins’ war, one man versus everyone else. (As someone who knows John well notes wryly, the odds are about even, then.) Chapter 3 kicks off with a badass bang of gasp-inducing, exhausting, inventive violence: kinetic, balletic, even witty. The hand-to-hand combat sequences are often up-close-and-personal squicky and meaty and mushy, gross but also intimate in a way that is the opposite of the cartoonish bloodlessness that characterizes the typical tedious action movie the Wick saga has put to shame. Even when it’s random anonymous minions Wick is dispatching, you don’t forget that they’re people. And yet it’s also like physical comedy, lethal Harold Lloyd versus deadly Charlie Chaplin, on steroids and painkillers, even when it’s not funny — though sometimes it is.
Parabellum is a veritable symphony of violence, and after that slam-bang opening sonata comes a slow movement, ringing with dark notes. (Later comes Wick’s minuet with another assassin, Sofia [Halle Berry: Kingsman: The Golden Circle, X-Men: Days of Future Past], who owes him a favor sealed in blood, against their world. She’s a dog lover, as John is. If you think the stunts with human actors are gripping, wait till you meet Sofia’s dogs.) In the slow movements — there’s another later, a much needed rest for us, as well as for Wick — the film indulges in expanding the glorious, subtle worldbuilding its predecessors began sketching. (But not expanding it too much. Even at the end, there remains so much tantalizing room to explore.)
This is not our reality but an ever-so-slightly fantasy-adjacent alt, one in which the retro funky and the sleekly modern sit comfortably next to each other, but also — much more importantly — one in which there appears to be a degree of order and honor among a profoundly interwoven and interconnected criminal underworld that would be comforting to imagine actually existed. (Absolutely stealing the movie, even from the rivetingly charismatic Reeves: Asia Kate Dillon as The Adjudicator, from the guild’s ruling High Table, arriving to pass judgment on all the rule-breaking that has been going on. OMG, give them their own movie, now.) I suspect this is part of the appeal of this fictional universe; maybe the reason why civilians here barely seem to notice all the ol’ ultraviolence happening around them is because they know — either consciously or just as a matter of the cultural social contract — that it will not impact them. (Social contracts, spoken and unspoken, discussed and assumed, are a matter of great import here.)
But then, Parabellum is about the sham, sometimes, of the seeming orderliness of the world, of any world. John’s crime, the one that got him declared excommunicado, is the act in which he killed a fellow guild member at New York’s Continental, which is not just a hotel and social club for guild members, but also safe-space neutral ground where no guild member can be harmed by another. But the man he killed had transgressed the rules (in Chapter 2) in a way far more muted, in a way that could never be proven to be a transgression. Chapter 3 is, as its predecessors were, a vigilante movie… but in a way like never before, this vigilante truly has no authentic approved recourse: neither the legal nor pseudolegal structures he exists and operates within will recognize the rightness of his actions. They literally cannot recognize justice, in this instance, it’s so alien to their bureaucracy.
This will be a recurring motif throughout Chapter 3: “There are rules and there are consequences.” But what happens when the rules and the seeming sense of order protect, even if unwittingly, those who act in bad faith? What happens when order masks chaos and injustice?
There’s a reason why the John Wick movies are resonating today, and it goes beyond the pure cinematic pinnacle of its beautifully choreographed action and its weary tenacity in the face of adversity. Even beyond the utter embodiment in stolid Keanu Reeves as the phlegmatic voice of a burnt-out generation. It’s about the sense that the authority and the institutions we have perceived as reliable and in charge are letting us down not out of any outright fault of their own (or maybe so, too) but because they simply don’t work anymore. Maybe never did… but now we see it. This is, I think, a profound reflection of our times, one we are just beginning to wake up to.
see also:
• John Wick movie review: deadly dancing
Date night, coming up!
(If only it had been released in time for Mothers’ Day.)
Awesome review! My heart’s still pounding three days later after watching this ballet of bullets and blades
SPOILER ALERT
“Okay Jimmy, I know you’re only 9, but here’s 50 million dollars, you can make any movie you want!”
“Any movie I want?”
“Yep, just tell us what to put in it, and we’ll make it.”
*Jimmy takes a deep breath* “I wanna make a movie with a cool guy with guns and knives and swords and he rides a motorcycle and fights ninjas and gangsters and arabs and they all try to shoot him but they all miss and he shoots them and he knows a lady and she has dogs and he rides a horse and he headshots all the bad guys and there’s dancers and wrestlers and birds and a mean secretary lady that tells all the ninja bad guys to kill him so he goes to a old lady and asks her for help and she says no you’ve been bad, but then he says please and she says okay and helps him run away, and then he finds a guy in Africa and asks him for help, but he says no you’ve been bad, but then he says please and he says okay and he helps him find the boss guy with a jeep in the desert, and he asks the guy for help, but he says you have to kill the old bad guy and cut your finger off, but then he helps the old bad guy and the new bad guys get mad and they send mean bad guys with bike helmets and bulletproof armour and he has to go to a big room full of guns to get a bigger gun and he shoots them all and their heads all explode and then he climbs a tower like Game of Death, and then he fights the miniboss bad guys and they throw him into glass like Robocop and then he fights the boss of the movie with a bunch of mirrors like Enter the Dragon, and then he stabs him in his heart, and the boss guy says you’re so cool I wish I could be cool like you, but the cool guy says no you can’t be cool like me, then the mean lady tells another bad guy to shoot him and he falls down and then he runs away……”
“Is that it?”
“and… and the dogs kill the bad guys, and the horses kill the bad guys too. Can you make me a movie like that Mr. Hollywood?”
“You got it Jimmy!”
And thus one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen was created. This isn’t even a parody of a parody. It’s trying to be stupid in a clever way, but to paraphrase Enid, it’s so stupid it’s gone past funny and back to stupid again. There’s exactly one well-choreographed fight – the knife throwing brawl at the beginning. Oh, and the dogs are cute, if a little forced. Every other fight is unimaginative, repetitive dreck. Keanu Reeves somehow makes Charlize Theron look like Bruce Lee. The final battle made me laugh out loud because it reminded me of three children play wrestling with their grandpa, desperately trying not to injure him. Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman are reduced to making that jogging in place churning motion with their arms that stuntmen do when they’re trying to stall for time so Reeves can catch up. It’s embarrassing. Rewatch their work in the final fights of The Raid and The Raid 2 (two movies with similarly awful writing and acting but far far better action) to see their physical potential.
The editing and direction are fine, but the choreography feels unfinished and rushed which is surprising coming from a director who was a stuntman. The only thing worse than the choreography is the writing, and the only thing worse than the writing is the acting. There are two actors who perform well, each acting in a completely different movie: Asia Kate Dillon is a perfect, no-nonsense straight woman and is the only actor that doesn’t sound hammy during moments of tension (although I was hoping she’d demonstrate her own gun-fu at some point), and Mark Dacascos, the one actor who truly understands what a colossally stupid movie he’s in, is perfect as a Wick fanboy, and provides the only moments of genuine levity and authentic emotion during the entire 130 minute ordeal.
END SPOILER
As a person who liked the first movie, skipped the second, and thinks Keanu Reeves is a super cool, hard-working, admirable dude in real life, this is one of the worst action movies I’ve ever seen. If it wasn’t for that knife fight at the beginning and the cute pet tricks, this might be the worst action movie I’ve seen in the past ten years. Reeves has aged fantastically in the face, but dear lord you can see every one of those fifty-four years in his body movement and then some. There’s a scene where his stunt double jumps onto a motorcycle, and the difference in fluidity and speed is night and day. Stahelski not so subtly equates fighting with ballet in the school scenes, a common equation; however the comparison literally falls flat here. At least he realized how ludicrous it would be for a clumsy, stumbling Reeves to defeat Ruhian or Rahman. It’s not that Reeves is fighting with a grittier messier style than his opponents – he looks like a senior citizen trying and failing to keep up with a bunch of teenagers out there. The action is halting, it’s ugly, it’s boring, and it’s supposedly what these movies are all about. You done fucked up Jimmy.
To be fair, I like plenty of stuff that many people find colossally stupid, so to each their own. For Zeus’ sake though, if you’re a young person who likes this, please watch some classic Chow Yun Fat or Yukari Mishima or Michelle Yeoh or Jackie Chan, or any of the dozens of movies from the early 90’s that inspired this insipid copy of a copy of a copy, and I guarantee they’ll give you the same stupid “cool guns go bang now” fix in a much smoother package.
To be clear, you liked it, right?
You know, during the first act it’s so self-consciously stupid, it’s kind of wonderful. The library fight lacks imagination, but it’s not bad per se, and the dog tricks are fun, but right around when Wick goes on a chili cook-off, car commercial spirit quest to find the president of the Kwik-E-Mart and repeats a story beat for the third time with Prince Salman and the funky grandpa bunch, I checked out. His stunt double body slams one of the minibosses through the floor about an hour later which is kind of neat.
It’s “Everything That Was Cool When You Were 9: The Movie,” starring Stiff Grumpy Grandpa and The Bad Accents. It even has obnoxiously stupid subtitles. The only way to salvage a script this awful would’ve been to lean into the stupidity hard, Samurai Cop style – Dacascos gets it. I guess it succeeds as arthouse Doom/Max Payne/Mortal Kombat if you enjoy two hours of one verb that runs out of ideas in the first half hour.
It didn’t help that I watched it right after Booksmart, which has excellent writing (cool to see Target Women’s Sarah Haskins continue to get work), acting, and outstanding direction – Olivia Wilde’s not much of an actress, but she’s a damn virtuoso behind the camera. During the entire last hour of this Horse Wreck, all I could think was: “I wish there was another showing of Booksmart, so I could watch that again instead.”
Both of my favorite reviewers loved JW3 though, so I’m out of the loop on this one. A sequel is all but guaranteed, and I sincerely hope it’s one uninterrupted three hour shootout with the word “Bang” in bold neon rainbow gradient comic sans plastered over half of the screen for the entire run time. Just embrace the suck and turn this thing into a full on Monty Python sketch already.
I’ll still see it on bargain Tuesday, but you wrote some entertaining and honest reviews. Thanks.
Thanks for the hilariously honest take, you convinced me to go check it out despite promising myself never watching another John Wick movie after the mind-numbing and offensive white persecution gun porn fantasy that was John Wick 2 A.K.A. two hours of a white american exclusively mowing down russian and italian immigrants + black people, chinese folks and women coming over the US border. Hoping the politics are a little less regressive this time around, but I have my doubts…
WIck’s an equal opportunity killer this time around, but mainly kills Asians near the end (because ninjas, and they wanted to waste Ruhian and Rahman). Reeves is part native Hawaiian, but I think Wick is supposed to be some kind of Russian gypsy? I don’t know – none of it matters and none of it makes sense. It’s the nice, woke kind of racist that includes lots of characters of color that show up for one scene, have nothing important to do or say, and are never heard from again. One of them dies then undies to set up a sequel, and it means nothing, and no one cares.
I guess there’s a hint that the main bad guy pulling all the strings is a Saudi (or at least a Wahhabi) – there’s no story to hang anything political on. Just two hours of Wick shooting his guns, reloading his guns, and occasionally rolling so slowly that Sophia Petrillo could buy a Vespa, fill it with gas, get her hail done, wash her laundry, pick up the dry cleaning, Sing the Star Spangled Banner, and still have time to walk over and plant an orthopedic heel right in Wick’s Baba Yagas.
If these are the best assassins in the world, disband the Secret Service and give the bodyguards a permanent holiday. An elderly gentleman is rolling on the ground ten feet in front of a team highly trained killers with automatic rifles. He’s still rolling guys. Just mooove the barrel slightly and squeeze the trigger. You can even close your eyes, there’s no way to miss. Guys? Hello? Guys, he’s still rolling. Yeah, that guy. The guy rolling on the ground. That’s the guy you’re supposed to shoot. Come on guys, someone take a shot, in about five minutes he’s going to finish standing up and he looks really grumpy. Guys? *cue ten more minutes of exploding heads*
I’m exaggerating obviously, but it really is ridiculous that the movie expects the audience to believe that Wick is a master assassin. He’s riding a horse on the highway in a city full of people with guns trying to shoot him. If only there was a twist ending where we discovered the entire movie was actually a fanfic written by Dacascos’ character.
*Yukari Oshima
(almost all her stuff with Moon Lee is great cheesy HK fun: Dreaming the Reality, Angel Terminators 2, Beauty Investigators, etc.)
Accurate. Though I found a few more fights than just the (admittedly stand-out) early knife fight engaging, overall it was a very empty experience. I managed to have just the right amount of beer to find my inner Jimmy and enjoy it, but like said beer once it passed through me it didn’t leave anything behind but a little organ damage.
And you’re so right about Mark Dacascos.
What really makes it work is how him and his minions are basically shown as forces of nature, just mowing through the other assassins to make sure its them who get to collect the bounty. Setting him up as yet another stoic, hardened professional but with a couple level-ups. And then suddenly starts gushing like the Wick fanboy he’s been all along. Haha.
Odd: a lot of very old people in the audience (bargain day?) and a boy of about six with his parents–have people no sense any longer?
Enjoyed the film but thought it easily 15 to 30 minutes too long. That is becoming an annoying habit of recent films.
Ha! That struck me as hilarious — especially [SPOILERS] when Wick and some assassins openly have a knife fight in the middle of Grand Central Terminal and absolutely NOBODY flinches or screams or runs away from the action; they just studiously ignore the fighting and step around the dead bodies like it’s just part of their normal day. Come to think of it, maybe it’s a heightening of a tendency we already have, to go through the city ignoring all its human tragedies — the homeless, the mentally unstable screamers, and so on. But it was quite a striking choice.
And the social contract seems to extend to the animals as well. Wick’s dog gets safe passage. Even the HORSES weren’t freaking out when there was a gunfight right in the stables. And since none of them were shot, I guess they were right not to worry! (And bad things happen to people who hurt animals — both in this film and, I guess, the first one, the whole reason Wick’s story got kicked off in the first place.)
I was talking with a buddy about it before seeing this one (since the same applies to all). Joking about how this would show up on the news, the reporter talking about all the victims — a food cart owner, three club-goers, a homeless man — but after each one appending “… who turned out to be an assassin.”
And btw the fact that this extends to animals is why I felt like John Wick was cheating when he was escaping on the horse, and rides with its body between himself and the motorcycle assassins. He knows they’re not allowed to shoot the horse!
Ha, good point! I was worried about what would happen when he did that, but given the apparent unspoken rules of this universe it makes perfect sense.
I thought the tattoos in the first were at least a hint that John’s background was something other than suburban America, yeah.