John Wick is basically a perfect action movie. It has a short, compelling setup, it goes on a well-paced, action-packed ride while being somehow plausible (while also being totally impossible), drops little hints at a cool underground world that normal people aren't aware of, and comes to a satisfying conclusion. John Wick: Chapter 4 is very precisely not that.
I really wanted to like the movie, of course; I loved the first one, I liked the second one, I kind of liked the third one. But I just couldn't manage it this time. It's so incredibly long, and so much of it is pointless time-wasting. They continue a several-movies-long trend of constantly expanding their mythology, and all this achieves is shrinking the world of the imagination that surrounds it, and totally untethering it from reality. It seems pretty technically competent, but a lot of movies are pretty technically competent. It brings back "fan favorites" that I do not care about even slightly (like Winston) or serve zero purpose in the whatsoever (like Morpheus Pigeon Man the Bowery King).
I could keep going on, really, but I think you get the point; there are a lot of flaws. The total detachment from reality is probably the main one, in the end. In the earlier movies he had to go to a doctor when he got shot. He could barely move after taking enough of a beating. He interacted with normal human goons who had mundane things like "names" and "fears." He was always a bit superhuman, of course, but he rode the line of plausibility well enough, especially in the first movie, and as he stepped further and further beyond it just became too much. I laughed out loud in the theater when he fell four stories, landed on a car (cars must be very soft in the John Wick universe based on the number of zero-damage collisions he has with them), and just immediately got up without a second thought and walked away.
Basically, he has become a video game character; he has some health bar (you can't see it, but it's there) and he's fine until it runs out. He does outrageous things to kill enemies who are optimally staggered to make for an interesting stage the player will beat, rather than behaving like people who are trying to kill him. As my wife pointed out, none of hundreds of henchmen sent after him are women; my current theory is the game artist ran out of budget after blowing it all modeling "huge guy with huge traps." They managed to put some women in the game as suicide girls again, in case you forgot what game world you were in, and one even managed to have a role where she both had a few lines and a face! (seems hard to initiate many guys into the family if your singular leader has to cattle brand themselves to do it, gonna run out of space pretty fast).
Similarly the rest of the movie has a problem with what I think of as "video game spaces." When you're playing a video game, sometimes you realize that the area you're moving through is theoretically based on a "real" place - maybe a restaurant, or a house, or a factory - but the actual level design is totally divorced from what that place might look like. Everything is conveniently placed to be video game-y; random doors everywhere, random windows or non-windows, weird one-way paths and hallways that truly only make sense in the context of a video game, because they're designed as set pieces to run through rather than places that people inhabit. John Wick 4 embodies it in movie form. He runs through sequences of rooms and buildings that are clearly designed exclusively for John Wick to run through, and for no other purpose. On the other hand, it was pretty cool when he found a new weapon drop and it switched to overhead game camera shooting everyone with a magic fire-enchanted boomstick. Reminded me of when the Doom movie with the Rock and Karl Urban went into the First Person Shooter game mode, except, you know, this one isn't ACTUALLY based on a video game.
This is already really long, so I'll wrap it up with one last point, which is that I spent a long time wondering why I was supposed to care about his quest for "revenge" (?) against no one in particular (?) for doing nothing in particular (?). Oh no, the villain was mean off-screen to some guy John Wick doesn't even like, I guess, or something. I miss his character having a purpose rather than his purpose being "because this is the next stage." But hey, if you really only care about Guys Shooting Guys In The Face, this movie will still get the job done.
Score: 5/10
IMDb: John Wick: Chapter 4
PS: it's really funny to me that the movie of the four that is by far the best (the first) has the lowest critic Rotten Tomatoes score. It just makes it so apparent how much of rating a movie is based on reputation, rather than the actual content of the movies. It was a normal action movie, so they didn't give it that much respect; now, it is a Franchise so it automatically gets a boost. Kind of like video game reviews!
PPS - it's weird that Donnie Yen's two highest profile Western movies are both as a blind guy with a stick, right? I think it's weird. My wife wants him to be Don Wick now.
