I saw John Wick: Chapter 4. It would be so easy to write a lazy negative review. You could just talk about the things film critics usually talk about, and score them on a rubric, like a high school paper.
John Wick's pacing is erratic. The movie is "unnecessary". The editing repeatedly violates Hollywood's typical three-act structure--you could cut nearly the entire film and have the same basic story. The acting is all either wooden or scenery-chewing and mainly serves to deliver one-liners. There are no obvious stakes, since John Wick's entire premise is that he is a super badass who kills anyone and anything sent to kill him. Characters waste the talent of their famous actors, appearing and disappearing in brief cameos. Motivations are one-dimensional and often silly. Two and a half hours is too long, it's a tedious and exhausting length for an action movie. The whole film is just a thin excuse to have videogamey action set pieces in exotic locales, like a Pierce Brosnan era James Bond blockbuster.
The reasons why you might say John Wick 4 is a bad movie, on paper, are predictable enough that you could get ChatGPT to write all the reviews. This is a by-the-numbers, textbook bad movie, the kind of film you would show to film students to warn them what happens if they don't apply anything they learn in film school.
John Wick 4 is not a bad movie. John Wick 4 is a great movie, for exactly the reasons the newspaper film critic formula would say it is bad. You see, John Wick films are action movies; they understand and exemplify the genre, borrowing heavily from a long tradition of Hong Kong blood operas and Hollywood blockbusters and French stunt and dance films where the idea that anyone comes to them to see anything but spectacle is a poorly veiled fiction. And they make no apologies for it--unlike other action movies, the John Wick movies do not even maintain the fig leaf of Cinema necessary to keep that inevitable two star review from diving to one star.
The success of the first John Wick freed the series from all pretension--it let go of anticipated critical eyerolling about suspension of disbelief and thematic nuance and the hero's journey and all that stuff and just gave us three films of acrobatic gunfights to synthwave music. These are dance movies with firearms.
John Wick 4 cares even less about being a movie than the first three. It will absolutely stretch your suspension of disbelief (especially in one scene set in Berlin that TikTok is already making fun of), even if you accepted the magical realism trappings of the second and third films. It cares little about elevating the series beyond the sum of its parts in character development, panders little to fans in terms of lore, and benefits in very few ways from the medium of film--it could easily have been a great or perhaps even better comic book, TV series, or video game instead. Wick doesn't grow or change all that much as a character; you will not walk away feeling illuminated. It is glorious nonsense.
What does it offer instead?
Some of the most exciting and expressive fight choreography in cinematic history, set to an incredible soundtrack. (I almost wish the film had no dialogue, and told its entire story through motion, like a ballet--the unique personality of each character, and each conflict, comes across best in how they move.) Gorgeous cinematography, bold in composition and lighting, far above and beyond the textbook camerawork of most Marvel films. Nontraditional stakes and motivations. Really cool, eccentric side characters in striking cosplay-ready costumes. Donnie Yen and Keanu Reeves both kicking ass again, while also expressing the weariness of aging action stars who can still do it all but are getting way too old for this shit. A surprisingly competent, tense, satisfying ending.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is unsurpassed in the kind of spectacle you go to the theater for a John Wick film expecting to see. It would be absolutely underwhelming on the small screen, and you'd probably fall asleep watching it streaming at home. But if you come to the theater to eat popcorn in a big dark room and watch a ten foot tall Keanu Reeves stylishly murder some bad guys to the beat of club music in front of warehouse scale installation art, this movie delivers tremendously.
And, psst, it succeeds at the Cinema things too, in subtle ways, unburdened by its low expectations. Themes of the endless cycle of revenge, the failure of rules and order to mitigate the fundamental barbarism of violence, and the weariness of people overexposed to bloodshed in a bloodthirsty world--these all run through this film in undercurrents, as they did in the previous three. This film doesn't glorify murder as much as reflect how sick we are of it in a world that puts murderers on a pedestal. John Wick may be the biggest badass in the international murderer trade association, but he's also a sad, lonely middle-aged widower who understands better than anyone that being a stone cold killer never fixes anything, if anything it just constantly makes things worse. He is deeply relatable as a character in how badly he just wants a moment of peace, something that is always tantalizingly just out of reach, in his world and ours.
There's just something enormously satisfying, zeitgeist-wise, about watching all these would-be badasses in tacticool combat gear, armed to the teeth in tricked-out customized military weapons and trained in the very best of movie martial arts, pulling off clever tactical maneuvers even a superhuman assassin can't fight his way out of, getting brutally and spectacularly out-violenced by a floppy haired wife guy in a black-on-black suit who doesn't even care.
And when the bad guys are of John Wick's caliber? It's so common to have the mooks in a fight scene be pushovers, to show off how competent the protagonist is, and then have the big bad antagonist fight the protagonist to a stalemate before one of them cheats to a sudden victory. (This is why so many Marvel fights are so tedious--looking at you, Avengers!) But the best fights in this film pull off the difficult trick of also making the mooks superhuman in combat ability, as assassins of assassins--they're hitting Wick with elaborate martial arts combos, they're pulling off contortionist cheap shots and throwing concealed knives from their clothes, they're dodging bullets and disabling guns in close quarters, they're deflecting gunfire with the body armor on their gloves--and Wick still beats them, in ways that suggest he is so experienced at fighting even superhuman masters of hand-to-hand combat that he reads them all like a book.
Five stars. See it instead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I'm serious.