John Wick: Chapter 4
Director: Chad Stahelski
Writer: Shay Hatten, Michael Finch
Sequel to: John Wick, John Wick: Chapter 2, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, George Georgiou, Lance Reddick, Clancy Brown, Ian McShane, Marko Zaror, Bill Skarsgård, Donnie Yen, Aimée Kwan, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins
Seen on: 6.4.2023

Content Note: fatmisia

Plot:
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has been condemned by the High Table to be hunted for the rest of his probably very short life. But he is not willing to give up without a fight, so he, in turn, starts to hunt the High Table, killing his way up the chain of command. Meanwhile, the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), head of the High Table, hires an old friend of John’s, Caine (Donnie Yen) to take him out before John can complete his mission.

I was really very excited about John Wick: Chapter 4, but I have to admit that I was disappointed by the film. It’s way too long, and the fight scenes just didn’t feel as great anymore as in the previous installments.

The John Wick movies have so far been some of the best action movies of recent times, and I enjoyed each of the chapters immensely – until this one. And I’m honestly a little heartbroken about it. My first misgivings about the film were actually before I saw it, when I heard that they had cast Scott Adkins in the film – and put him in a fat suit. But I was still willing to be excited about the film and hoped that the fat suit sequence would just be a small part of the film. (It was, though still an entirely unnecessary one.)

The real trouble, though, came when it became clearer and clearer to me that Chapter 4 – probably never envisioned in the first place when they began making the first movie – felt barely tied to the Chapters that came before it, proving that turning something into a series when it was never planned as such really isn’t easy. So we get new characters introduced left and right, while the old ones have barely anything to do.

But this still could have worked – at least if they had limited themselves to a shorter runtime and fewer car chases. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they tried so hard to make things bigger that they kind of lost track of the story and the characters. Plus, apart from a few truly exciting moments, I just didn’t feel like the fights were actually up to par. The fight choreographies so far were experimental, innovative and fresh. In Chapter 4, for the first time, they bored me. (And none so much as the final fight on the stairs leading up to Montmatre.) They started to feel generic. And the fight in the club with the club layout itself and the lack of reaction of the people around them catapulted me out of any suspension of disbelief I could muster up (and the films do demand a lot of suspension which was fine so far).

I wouldn’t have thought it possible that I would glance at my watch during a John Wick film, but with its almost 3 hours runtime, Chapter 4 really pushes it too far. And I can’t say that I’m excited anymore about the fact that, against all narrative odds, they are working on a fifth film. I’ll probably still watch it, but with a lot more concerns about its quality than I would have guessed.

Summarizing: disappointing.