The John Wick series has always subsisted on momentum, so it’s no surprise the third chapter of the saga begins on a dead run — or to be more exact, a lope and a limp. Picking up moments after the previous film’s conclusion, all you need to know is that bruised, indestructible Keanu Reeves must beat the clock (and dozens of assassins) to find sanctuary before a $14 million bounty on his head goes live. As usual, every plot beat and piece of dialogue is stripped to bare essentials, all the better to make way for the action bits — and John Wick 3‘s opening cavalcade of can-you-top-this setpieces ranks among the best the series has produced. See Keanu take on NBA giant Boban Marjanovic in a tip of the hat to Bruce Lee vs. Kareem Abdul-Jabar! Witness Keanu fight off Asian thugs in an antique weapons shop, knives flung back and forth with the abandon of a food fight! Watch Keanu gallop through the streets of New York on horseback, taking out motorcylists left and right!
Of course, it didn’t exactly start out this way. The first John Wick was an invigorating corrective to the bloat of Hollywood action cinema, boiling its hero’s motivation down to near-parodic yet human dimensions: No one gets away with stealing my car and killing my dog. It would have been straight-to-video schlock in lesser hands, but directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch used their action chops to fashion a lean, mean machine fueled by first-person shooter aesthetics, martial arts, and Reeves’ wounded Zen detachment. Chapter 2 was a more baroque affair, as the directors dove deeper into their cockeyed vision of a criminal underworld governed by arcane, cult-like regulations, populated with everyone from street-level trash to clock-punching professionals using gold coins in place of corporate expense cards.
Chapter 3 wants to have it all, ramping up the action while it strains towards global proportions. Wick’s odyssey takes him from New York’s rainy, technicolor streets to an assassin/ballet training school presided over by gypsy-like Anjelica Huston, and then all the way to Morocco for a meet-up with an old marker (Halle Berry) as well as a desert rendezvous with a man who might be the killer of all killers (Said Taghmaoui). Eventually it boils down to the same question that confronted Wick in Chapter 1: can a bad man leave his past behind for good, or will it come back to claim him? That same quandary haunts classic samurai series such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Zatoichi, and Reeves, more hang-dog and weary than ever, evokes the taciturn heroes of those flicks. Even Mark Dascascos as Zero, Wick’s primary antagonist, is straight from the Japanese cinema playbook. Deadly with a blade and resembling Toshiro Mifune’s rival from Sanjuro, he mirrors the audience’s sentiments towards Wick: “I gotta say, I’m a pretty big fan.”
Less straightforward than the first entry and lacking the flamboyant touches of the second, John Wick: Chapter 3 (with solo direction by Stahelski this time) is an impressive feat of stamina, if nothing else, devoting all its innovation to violence. “How can you fight the world?” Huston asks Wick early on, and the answer comes fast and furious: Quite well, thank you very much. Encyclopedic in its action moves, the film appropriates virtually every form of human transport and automatic weaponry while racking up a body count in the hundreds. (If you have a soft spot for dogs, you’ll be jazzed by a shootout in which a duo of Malinois shoot breathlessly in and out of frame when they’re not tearing out miscreants’ throats.) These dances of death are more brutal than intoxicating, but you can tell the filmmakers are respectful of the genre’s history, especially when they trot out Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman, two stars from The Raid, for an affectionate cameo.
The second act in Morocco drags, as Berry playacts at being a hard-ass to less than convincing effect, and Wick (and the film) get lost in a literal and metaphorical desert; “Sometimes you have to kill what you love” is as deep as the fortune-cookie philosophizing gets. Fortunately Stahelski regains his senses for a final conflagration back in Manhattan within the posh confines of The Continental, renowned hotel for assassins everywhere. The climax goes gonzo with gunfights, martial arts fisticuffs filmed against cool nighttime neon backdrops like Skyfall, and the sight of Reeves (or at least his floppy-haired stunt double) getting hurled through glass multiple times. The series’ raison d’etre has always been ultraviolence, and Parabellum (Latin for “prepare for war” — one wonders what the actual war will be like given the levels of destruction witnessed here) fulfills its brief dutifully. “That was a pretty good fight, huh?” Dacascos says at one point, anticipating the expected audience reaction.
On the other hand, even hardcore action junkies weaned on Reeves mowing down faceless hordes might be a little exhausted (and indifferent) by the time the one thousandth faceless henchman is dispatched with a kill shot to the head. Clearly running low on ingenious ways to butcher people, the filmmakers opt for quantity over quality this time. Those seeking actual human interaction might seek solace in the presence of Huston, Laurence Fishburne, Lance Reddick, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Ian McShane as prominent underworld members, but apart from a few flashes of brio from Fishburne and Huston’s hammy Slavic drawl, the soundtrack is less tuned to dialogue than it is to the raucous clackety-clack of gunfire.
“Are you pissed off, John?” a friend asks Wick in the closing stretch. “Yeah,” is Reeves’ clenched, inevitable reply. Yes, this time it’s personal, but wasn’t the John Wick series personal to begin with? With its hitman-trying-to-go-straight story now inflated to overwrought, existential heights, what is left for the unstoppable Wick to do except kill the world? Having more fun with genre conventions than with actual story, John Wick 3 is both an apotheosis and a dead end. The filmmakers will no doubt seek out fresher and more inventive methods of murder in the next installment, but diminishing returns are already kicking in. It’s ironic that a series that initially distinguished itself by avoiding made-for-video cliches may well end up on that level.
