John Wick – Chapter 4: Judgment Day has arrived

In the beginning there was nothing…

It’s 2014, and the story of John Wick opens with a double drama. Ex-hitman John Wick (Keanu Reeves) loses the love of his life, Helen, following a long illness. This, far-sighted, prepared him a posthumous gift so that he would not die of loneliness: an adorable puppy. John doesn’t have time to ease his mourning for his wife when three Russian mobsters arrive at his house to steal his car. killing puppy Daisy in passing.

Nine years and three movies later, it’s become the revenge born of a trivial heist gone wrong a war of titansa global conflict, a ruthless and relentless confrontation between one man and the most powerful criminal organizations in the world.

From a neo-noir film confined to the slums of New York, John Wick became a great action sagaacquiring an ever greater dimension from film to film, bringing his anti-hero to Rome, on the sands of the desert, under the Japanese neon lights, in the Berlin night and finally on the steps of the Sacred Heart.

Logically, mechanically, this John Wick: Chapter 4 is in all respects similar to the evolution of his character: a monstrous machine whose the excitement has no limits.

The great art of combat

John Wick: Chapter 4 it can be divided into three times, three places, three great battles. Following the events of John Wick: Parabellum, John Wick is more than ever hunted by the Great Table, his head still has a price. But because he was helped by Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick), manager and concierge of the Continental in New York, he hastened the destruction of this hotel. As one of the characters says at the beginning of John Wick: Chapter 4“everything John Wick touches dies“…

Observation as much as prophecy, this truth is an immediate reality. As soon as John Wick arrives in Japan, in Osaka, The Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), charged with eliminating John Wick and his allies, sends his men there to a monumental first action sequence. For this and the following ones, the sliders are maxed out, with a brutality and an excessively enjoyable character.

Guns fire, fists bang, arrows and katanas tear through the air. Bodies spin, tumble, collide, blood splatters and bones break. It’s cathartic, it’s stunning, and just when we’ve had too much to drink, Chad Stahelski and screenwriters Michael Finch and Shay Hatten deliver a life-saving breath of fresh air with a well-dosed second degree. Because John Wick seems invincible, because he’s also basically a good man, we always find time to smile, even laugh.

An action show never seen before

It takes, to hope to defeat him, an opponent within the reach of John Wick. This is all found with Caine, embodied by the legendary Donnie Yen. An assassin also retired from business, blind, a friend of John Wick, but who has no choice but to follow the Marquis’ orders to hope save his daughter of this world where you can die in a second.

When John Wick comes face to face with him for the first time, after an already daunting fight, she doesn’t have the heart to take him down when she could. John Wick has lost his wife and struggles to do it his memoryCaine struggles with losing his daughter. Who should win?

In this madness where distances are abolished, we go in a flash to Berlin. There, John Wick faces, at the Berghain, a mythical disco, an obese and cartoonish Scott Adkins but with intact and diabolical fighting skills, to win the right to challenge the Marquis, according to the rules of the High Table. And it is in Paris that this definitive confrontation will take place.

Paris is especially honored in John Wick: Chapter 4. The sequence around the Arc de Triomphe, where bullets are as bullets as cars, is a stratospheric pinnacle of action cinema. It is a pity if we notice clearly visible inlays and artifices here and there.

Later, at the end of a night in which John Wick will have dispatched a horde of assassins in his way – we keep an incredible zenithal sequence -, he will still have to violently climb the steps that lead to the Sacred Heart. In its constant excess, John Wick: Chapter 4 however, he does not avoid defects in his choreography, which do not always manage to achieve the finesse and fluidity of the cinema – essentially Asian – from which he draws inspiration.

John Wick, pure mythology

We sensed it. We knew it. Since he has been constantly hunted down, since the last act of John Wick: Chapter 2, John Wick just survived. And the best defense is still the offense. Looking straight and hard despite his arched back and uneven gait, John Wick anticipates his fate without turning, retracing his steps, or stopping.

Like Achilles in Troy, like Hercules in his labours, John Wick is a demigod with a destiny engraved in marble. Murderer whose rebirth was made in death – that of Helen and Daisy – his journey also leads to his death. His allies, Winston and Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), tell him, repeat it, just as his enemies promise. After all, they know it themselves, they are all housed in the same boat. Only death, the ultimate justice of the peace, is at the end of the road.

In his Stations of the Cross, John Wick is naked. Unlike in previous works, he no longer has access to the abundant armories of the Continental hotels. In this John Wick: Chapter 4can even speak even less than before, hoarse-voiced monosyllabic warrior. A paradoxical and bittersweet feeling emerges: yet the protagonist and source of all this mythology, John Wick is like absent and indifferent to himselfpuppet and engine of a tragic destiny, alone against all with his black suit and his only gun.

The show of John Wick: Chapter 4very simple and ultra generous, it then becomes thea pure representation of its conceptrefined and maximalist.

John Wick, what have you become?

There is John Wick, and there are the others. While taking up the basic scheme of John Wick: Parabellumwhich consisted of focusing with manic precision on the action sequences and fight choreographies, John Wick: Chapter 4 look for a new emotion about the intrigues held by the secondary characters.

There’s the Tracker (Shamier Anderson), sort of free agent of this game to slaughter in the role of a hipster adventurer, accompanied by his faithful and formidable Malinois shepherd. Why, What would a John Wick movie be without a dog? There’s Caine, whose love for his daughter is heartbreaking. There is Akira (Rina Sawayama), the daughter of Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), also seeking revenge. And then there’s still Katia (Natalia Tena), head of Ruska Roma…

Many characters who come to populate a universe and feed it with random successes, in a form of nonsense with John Wick, since this applies to do the emptiness that surrounds it. Another paradox of this John Wick: Chapter 4 which, with the others, both in form and in substance, make up all its charm.

Martyr, a Christ-like character who came to suffer to atone for the violence of the world, John Wick is no longer the grieving former assassin seeking vengeance. He is an enigmatic superhuman being, a perfect killing machine which, however, cannot stand a single second that we can mistreat a dog. A dizzying enigma that, at the end of almost three hours of John Wick: Chapter 4it leaves us strangely touched, remarkably exhausted and above all very satisfied.

John Wick: Chapter 4 by Chad Stahelski, in theaters on March 22, 2023. Above the trailer. Find all our trailers here.

Source: Cine Serie

Ray

Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.