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Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry and some very, very mean dogs in John Wick Chapter 3 |
Director: Chad Stahelski
Cast: Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Ian McShane (Winston), Mark
Dacascos (Zero), Laurence Fishbourne (The Bowery King), Asia Kate Dillon (The
Adjucator), Halle Berry (Sofia), Lance Reddick (Charon), Anjelica Huston (The
Director), Saïd Taghmaoui (The Elder), Jerome Flynn (Berrada)

John Wick: Chapter 3 –
Parabellum doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Instead it’s effectively a
two-hour series of fight sequences. What plot there is pops up around the edges
of all this imaginative blood-letting. That plot doesn’t really make much
sense, and can basically be summarised as John has been declared excommunicado by “The High Table”, the
shady organisation that runs the criminal underworld, meaning he is a target
for every assassin in the world, and he is trying to reverse that decision.
That’s kind of it, and any other subplots are basically slightly confusing or
narratively empty detours from that central idea.
If you cut out all the fight sequences from the film, it
wouldn’t run a lot longer than 15 minutes. There isn’t really any interest in
the talking stuff or the characters, which seems to be fine for the likes of
Laurence Fishbourne, who is wheeled out for three scenes of badass scenery
chewing, but does mean that motivations and reasons for why anyone is doing
anything at all remain completely unclear. There is a key subplot involving Ian
McShane’s management of the Continental, the criminal “neutral zone” hotel in
the centre of New York, that involves so many changes of allegiance and
intentions that it winds up making no real sense.
But then people ain’t going to this for a character study.
They are there for the fights. And, as I say, these are really inventive and
entertaining. The first 20 minutes – with John haring through New York, trying
to stay one step ahead of a blizzard of killers – is brilliant. It’s designed
to be watched with large groups of people in the same mood, encouraging you to
laugh, wince and shout out with the people around you. You can’t fault the work
that has gone into the filming of this or the commitment of the actors or the
genius of the choreographers. All of this is pretty faultless. And, no matter what
extended fight you watch, you know you will see something different in every
single one.
The problem is, the vast number of fights begins to pummel
the audience into submission as well. Seeing Keanu Reeves involved in a series
of three-in-a-row mixed martial arts sequences, each lasting well over 5-10
minutes, you start to let the whole thing drift over you. Put bluntly, after
the initial explosion of action, the film hits a level it tries to sustain for
almost an hour. And it’s too much. You just can’t keep that same level of
engagement. I actually nearly dropped off at one point, which is not a good
sign. How much action can one film take?
There needs to be a balance. And without any real investment
in what we are seeing, John Wick 3 is
another of those films designed for YouTube. I can imagine watching most of
these fights as little five-minute videos on the Internet in the future.
Actually broken down like this I will probably enjoy it a lot more. But as a
single film, there is nothing there to link it together.
The first film had a simple, but very pure, storyline that
we could all relate to. A man loses his beloved wife, who on her deathbed gifts
him a dog to care for. Said dog is then killed in a senseless break-in by some
arrogant criminals. John Wick’s revenge is against those who thoughtlessly took
from him the last piece of the only woman he loved. Everyone can relate to that
– and it grounded everything we saw and immediately put us on John’s side. This
film however is a confused motivation-less mess. If the series originally
presented us with a John unwillingly dragged back into this world, since then
(and here) he seems like a character with no inner life.
The film attempts vaguely to add one, suggesting that John
must make a choice between being a killer or the better man. Problem is
choosing to be the better man isn’t really a platform for fights. So we lose
what the film really needs, which is John struggling between his good and bad
demons. Instead his motivations are a confused mess and the film spends more
time showing us the brutal groin attacks of Halle Berry’s dogs (those things
fight with no honour let me tell you) than giving us a lead character with a
coherent personality.
It makes John Wick 3
not a lot more than a YouTube compilation, and giving Ian McShane some Latin to
drop to explain the film’s title, or trying to change a character in Act 4 into
a personal rival for John, doesn’t suddenly give it depth or interest. It’s fun
in small chunks, but this is way too long and seems to have lost at least half
of what made the first film such a guilty pleasure.
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