Mark Reviews Movies: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2019

The first act of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum is an eruption of non-stop, dynamic action. The story begins immediately where John Wick: Chapter 2 ended, with our eponymous protagonist, a twice-retired assassin who keeps getting pulled back into his former life of killing, on the run. There's a substantial bounty on his life after he broke one of the underground society of assassin's cardinal rules. While the whole of the plot is basically an extended chase sequence with some lulls for plot necessities and clever world-building, the first 30 minutes or so don't provide any such downtime.

These bursts of combat are invigorating in the ways that the action sequences of this series have been since its inception, and for some reason, they feel even more so at the beginning of this installment. With every entry, we've received a reminder of what great action can be in the movies. We may think we've seen John Wick (Keanu Reeves) pummel and stab and shoot an assortment of anonymous henchmen in almost every way imaginable, but then the filmmakers find a way to come up with another dozen or so ways.

To wit, John's first opponent here, a giant of a man, comes at him in the stacks of a library. He can't just shoot the guy. That's not because it's a public place. There are a decent number of shootings and stabbings and fights done in plain sight, as if nobody in this world seems to care about such things (That might be because the film seems to suggest that killers-for-hire make up about a quarter of the population).

It's more a matter of honor. The guy comes at him unarmed, so John has to abide by the unspoken terms of battle. Anyway, John fights back with a book, ultimately killing the assassin by hammering said book into the man's open mouth.

This might be the least brutal death in the film, which sees nameless, faceless bad guys repeatedly shot at close range, mauled by attack dogs, skewered with all sorts of sharp weapons, kicked in the head by the hind legs of a horse, pulverized by high-speed collisions with cars, and likely done away by maybe a half-dozen other ways that aren't quite as noteworthy. All of it is once again executed by director Chad Stahelski in long takes and wide shots, so that we can see and appreciate the skills on display. Most of these examples of violence happen in that first act, which really, really is quite something.

To quickly recap, John got back into the killing game after the death of his wife and the killing of his dog—his wife's final gift to him—by a group of mobsters. After killing those villains, he had to go back into the business because of an old agreement he made with a blood oath. That adventure led him to kill someone on "consecrated" ground. Hence, he has a $14 million bounty on his head, and hence, professional killers from around the world are hunting him.

The plots of these films have always been this simple—so much so that one probably could watch this installment without seeing the previous two and still understand the most important elements of the world, the characters, and the overarching story. This isn't a complaint, because, when it comes to blatant genre exercises that exist for the sole purpose of giving us a lot of action spectacle, simpler is almost always better.

After all, we're only here for the action. Well, we're mostly here for the action, since this series also has created a weird, fascinating world of the rules, traditions, and ethics of professional killers. That world gets some new elements in this entry. We meet the Director (Anjelica Huston), who raised and trained an orphaned John to become a killer. She does this out of a theater, where she's overseeing an upcoming ballet performance. Which—the art or the killer training—is her primary job for her, and which is the side gig? Whatever the case, it certainly explains how John became a fighter of such fluid motion.

We discover there's some actual oversight within the realm of professional killers, as the straight-to-business Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) puts forth ultimatums to two men—Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of a New York hotel for assassins, and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who runs a group of killers disguised as the homeless—who helped John in his rule-breaking. Later, we meet the Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui), who lords over the entire enterprise from a traveling camp in the desert.

John also get a new ally during a trip to Casablanca. She's Sofia (Halle Berry), who runs the assassin-sanctuary hotel there, and the two—along with her obedient attack dogs—fight together against the goons of Berrada (Jerome Flynn), who makes the assorted trinkets that are the symbolic foundation of the assassin economy. The world established by these films always has been patently absurd, but the attention to detail and the continuing expansion of that world ground it in a strange, consistent logic.

This, admittedly, might be the least of the three films thus far (This one, again, ends with the promise of another sequel). Maybe the onslaught of action at the start is such an explosion of violent imagination that it diminishes what follows. Maybe the action overall is starting to feel a bit routine (The climax of this one, set in a room of glass and mirrors, borrows the basic concept of the last film's climax). That second thing matters for the future of this series, but at the moment, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum possesses enough new ideas—in terms of its world and John's methods of dispatching foes—to remain exciting.

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