At the end of the fourth film to his name, indestructible assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) falls down the stairs. Quite a few stairs in fact – thrown down the 222 steps of Paris’s famous Rue Foyatier by his enemies on his way to the final match at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, he fell down one after the other like a Slinky in a perfect phase. suit fit. Finally, he collapses at the top of the stairs, only to be once again thrown down the rest of the stairs, at which point silly time is spent watching him return to the path he had just climbed. turns into its own silly joke.
This part isn’t as funny as the rest of John Wick: Chapter 4 is two hours and 49 minutes long, even though it doesn’t really make sense. In a word, too much happens for our killing machine hero as he plots a bloody path from New York to Osaka, from Berlin to Paris.Scene after scene stretched beyond excess, hundreds of solemn ceremonies and over-the-shoulders landing in monotony without a wink of salvation. A completely sincere and utterly deadly fascination with itself drags a once critically acclaimed series for its brutality, malice into a logical death march of mourning speed. . Roger Ebert has memorably said that no good
movie is ever too long, his point is not that joy can last forever, but that a well-told story takes time. Buck’s latest outing indulges in greatness for its own good, and where unbridled excess has opened the door to wild inspiration in so many others, director Chad Stahelski is lacking in character. performer’s ability to build and achieve.
In the side quest’s messy story as well as the skillful combat sequences that go beyond their welcome, viewers begin to feel the difference between maximalism and just having so much somewhere around the third hour and mainly on our butts.Like Buck, Stahelski’s crew shot and shot and shot, too caught up in the action to stop and think about all it did.
This unnecessary stretch is particularly frustrating because the ongoing plot boils down to a single sentence: being hunted down by his former assassins, Buck must clean up his name by wiping out his name. beat the big new boss Marquis (Bill Skarsgard, whose pouty lips and literally silver breasts the spoon whose mouth marks him as an obnoxious and obsolete object) in a duel . Quite simply, if it weren’t for the world-building mysteries, the writers of this series decided that its audience couldn’t have had enough. We’re forced to go through about an hour of footage before an ally informs J-Dubs that this non-executable tag even exists, except that he can’t officially challenge the Most High. stripped until player card wolf
Buck pledges allegiance to one of the officially recognized cells of the clan. And he can’t do it until he strangles a local gangster (the big, agile Scott Adkins even in a Norbit-quality suit) to gain their favor.And such.
To the extent that Wick’s vehicles follow the same schematic as musicals, with shootouts taking the place of song-and-dance numbers, the script doesn’t have to do much more than usher the characters from one showstopper to the next. And each set piece has an amusing gimmick; an army of guys in bulletproof suits must be dispatched with headshots, a blind mercenary (Donnie Yen) picks off foes using doorbell sensors, an aerial shot follows Wick on a shotgun-flamethrower rampage. But the legendary Freed unit behind MGM’s Golden Age extravaganzas understood that you only get one multi-part dream-ballet fantasy suite, and that your grand finale – in this case, a melee in the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe that plays like a life-or-death game of Frogger – should come at the end. Just as an actor-turned-director gives his cast the free rein for scenery-gnawing he’s always wanted for himself, former stuntman Stahelski’s evident and often endearing affection for his professional peers gets the better of him in impressive battles nonetheless hampered by two or three extraneous beats.
There was a time when an economical-minded studio head would have forcibly excised the pointless horseback chase in the Middle East, or the wheel-spinning interlude in Germany, or the morally ambiguous Tracker (Shamier Anderson) that screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Finch can’t figure out what to do with. For whatever reason – the endless scroll of streaming content reorienting our concept of a long time, perhaps – Hollywood has made its peace with the three-hour blockbuster, and expects the public to do the same. The most faithful faction of the Wick fandom will undoubtedly be pleased to see their belief that you can’t have too much of a good thing put into practice. Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.
