In John Wick: Chapter Four Keanu Reeves Kills EVERYBODY. It's Pretty Great!

If you want to see Keanu Reeves murder people for three hours, John Wick: Chapter Four is the Magnificently Over-Stuffed Movie for you!

The brilliance of John Wick, and I do believe that it is a film of true and lasting brilliance, lies in the heart-tugging simplicity of its premise. A man of violence becomes a man of peace. The man of peace’s dog is killed. The man of peace becomes a man of all-out war once again in order to wreak bloody vengeance on the people responsible for him losing his beloved pup. 

It’s a story as old as time, as archetypal as boy meets girl or bear ingests cocaine. John Wick was a huge success. It changed action movies and led to sequels that expanded upon its bleak, hyper-violent world. 

It’s a little like The Fast and the Furious franchise. At the very beginning The Fast and the Furious was a relatively modest little action movie about car thieves and cops. It was a sizable success so the series just kept getting bigger and bigger until it became about a group of secret agents with borderline superpowers who are regularly called upon to save the world. 

If they were to announce that the next Fast and the Furious movie would take place in a multiverse and involve dinosaurs, dragons, time travel and a crossover with the Men in Black franchise nobody would be surprised. 

While I sincerely dug John Wick I have not seen John Wick 2 or John Wick 3. 

The very boring reason that I’ve skipped two entries in a series I quite like is that life has forced me to be very pragmatic and discriminating when it comes to entertainment options. 

If I’m not specifically watching a movie so that I can write about it I’m probably not going to see it because I have a VERY limited amount of time each day and a FUCK TON OF SHIT that needs to get done just so I can keep limping along professionally.

Thankfully experiencing the magic of John Wick was briefly part of the gig when I was writing my Sub Cult column over at Rotten Tomatoes and now watching and writing about John Wick 4 is my job here at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, where you voted for me to see it over the Children of the Corn remake and Guy Ritchie’s latest film. 

My response to the assignment was bifurcated. On one hand, I saw that that John Wick: Chapter 4, a third sequel to a movie about a guy who goes on a killing spree because someone killed his dog, was three hours long and thought, “a John Wick sequel is THREE HOURS long? Jesus, that seems like a LOT.” 

On the other, I thought, “A John Wick sequel is THREE HOURSE LONG? That seems like a LOT!!!”  

I was right! I was so right that the film could have been subtitled John Wick 4: It’s a Lot. 

John Wick 4 is a lot. Its world-building has gotten very dense and elaborate. The fundamental conceit of John Wick 4 is that a sort of alternate universe exists within our own in the form of a criminal underworld with an elaborate series of rules, rituals and traditions all its own.

This shadowy world beyond the law has its own legal system and sets of punishments. John Wick has broken our laws by killing, by my estimate, roughly six or seven million people but he’s also broken the laws of the underworld by killing powerful people who specifically are NOT supposed to be killed. 

The criminal code dictates that if you kill somebody who is not supposed to be killed then you, in turn, are marked for death. Being a responsible denizen of the criminal underworld John Wick tries not to kill the wrong people but when you kill as many people as he does, you’re eventually going to ruffle some feathers and then murder the people whose feathers you’ve ruffled.

There’s a lot of plot and world-building in John Wick 4 but it also has a through line that is very simple and easy to understand. The bad people are mad at John Wick and want to kill him for his aggressive disregard for the sanctity of human life. John Wick in turn needs to kill all of the bad people to avoid being killed himself.  

In John Wick 4 John Wick is at war with a shadowy criminal organization known as the High Table made up of twelve powerful crime lords. John Wick’s status as public enemy number one imperils the lives of his friends and allies as well. 

John Wick is a very dangerous man but he’s also a very dangerous man to be friends with. John’s old friend Winston Scott,(Ian McShane) the manager of The Continental, a mysterious hotel that caters to arch-villains, learns this firsthand when he refuses to kill John Wick for them and is stripped of his job, excommunicated from the criminal fraternity and has his best friend killed in front of him. 

Foppish dandy Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a bigwig at the High Table, will stop at nothing to extinguish the existential threat that John Wick poses. 

He puts a bounty on John Wick’s head worth tens of millions of dollars and, in what can only be deemed a total dick move, has Caine (Donnie Yen), a skilled blind assassin and old friend of John Wick, hunt down his old buddy. 

It’s a murderous free-for-all once the High Table lets it be known that it wants nothing more than for John Wick to meet his maker and will do anything to make that happen. 

John has allies like Winston, The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) and Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada), who pays a steep price for briefly protecting him but they’re wildly out-numbered by the villains. 

Like the other films in the series John Wick 4 doesn’t really have good guys so much as it has bad guys with a moral code who believe in something so much that they’re willing to both and kill die for it and black-hearted villains without a moral code and consequently nothing worth living or dying for. 

Like the previous three entries in the series John Wick 4 was directed by stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski. Stahelski’s priority as a filmmaker is coherence. He wants us to see what’s happening while it’s happening without resorting to quick cuts or flashy edits and other ways of cheating audiences so that stuntmen and editors do all the work while lazy movie stars get all the credit. 

John Wick 4 is full of endless, intricately choreographed set-pieces where John Wick and his overwhelmed and out-numbered pals methodically, deliberately eliminate every human obstacle in their path. And there are a LOT. 

This gloriously excessive bloodbath is full of violence of great quality and quantity. That level of brutality should prove exhausting. Instead it’s exciting. Watching John Wick kill EVERYBODY never gets old because Keanu Reeves is never anything less than furiously, completely engaged. 

When Reeves was still considered a walking punchline, a stoned surfer joke with a punchline no one could quite remember no one could have foreseen just how world-weary and existentially exhausted Reeves would one day seem. 

Reeves does not say a lot in John Wick: Chapter 4. He is a quintessential man of few words happy to let his hands and his guns do his talking for him. When he speaks, which is not often, it’s because he has to. 

Reeves is the mesmerizing quiet at the center of the storm, a Zen presence in the midst of non-stop murder and mayhem. He’s a killer with a heart of gold who loves puppies and hates evil. 

Now that Ernest P. Worrell is no longer with us it seems safe to anoint him our greatest hero and John Wick: Chapter 4 our greatest motion picture. 

That might seem excessive but John Wick kills a LOT of people in John Wick 4 in ways that look really cool. 

Star Rating: Three and a Half