John Wick uncovers a path to defeating The High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, Wick must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe and forces that turn old friends into foes. (if you want to know the ending, it’s here)
Deadly serious yet madly entertaining, with a cast to die for, John Wick 4 is also nearly three hours long: a stream of astonishing, sometimes numbing battles broken up by cod-philosophical aphorisms. Though from John himself there are few (very few) words, as he battles to free himself from the obligations of the High Table and the consequences of his disobedience.
John Wick 4, more even than the other films, calls back to the first and its myths. Films 2 and 3 seemed to do this to secure the foundations of Wick world-building; now it looks like a man whose past is catching up with his present.
Quotes are repeated and referenced; there’s another fight in a nightclub as its oblivious patrons dance on; once again, coloured artificial lights illuminate the numerous nighttime battles of this seemingly endless war; and while there’s only one pencil the film does offer its usual mountain of dead bodies, guns, knives and flame-throwers.
John’s mission takes him to the Middle East where he kills an Elder, to Japan seeking refuge with old friend and Osaka Continental manager Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada), to Berlin to request his crime family accept him back so he can challenge hubristic High Table rep the Marquis de Grammont (Bill Skarsgård) to a dual. Then it’s on to France where he fights his way through the city (watch out for a fantastic scene that looks down into an elegant Parisian building, following the destruction from room to room) and around the Arc de Triomphe (watch out for… well, lots of car crashes) en route to the Sacré-Cœur for his showdown with blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), yet another “old friend” who now has to kill him (remember Marcus?).
The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) jokingly calls this bloody round-the-world trip John’s “grand farewell tour”, and Reeves’s hitman seems both resigned to and content with his lot. When he’s not fighting, or on a horse, or spinning in a car, John Wick is the most awkward of men, only truly happy when he’s moving with a purpose, that purpose being someone’s death.
After the enjoyably crackers Parabellum I thought John Wick 4 would be too absurd. It actually works, and feels — for all its overwrought madness — like the chilly implacable first film in its attitude. John has been on a road since the beginning, and despite Winston’s early warning he couldn’t see it. Now he can and there’s nowhere else to go but follow it (and up and down flights of stairs, of which there are many).
Despite the film’s deadly seriousness it doesn’t feel its length, and I say this as a lover of the 98-minute movie. One of those films that is both good fun and not that funny, I think I laughed twice and one of those was when John ridiculously bounced down an enormously long flight of stairs to the bottom, when my reaction had to be that or cry on his behalf.
Could it have been snipped a little? Sure, there are indulgences: the French radio show especially. The fights, intricate and awe-inspiring as they are, can go on and on. So it’s the personal direct hits that resonate most: the crack of an arm pulled backwards til it snaps, a dog going for a hitman’s nuts, and my first wincing “oooh” of the movie: a fighter on top of the Osaka Continental, legs apart, pushed down to the floor doing involuntary splits.
Sometimes the battles raged so long my mind wandered and I started a shopping list in my head (Wick’s loss is Tesco’s gain). Cinema may be an escape but life intrudes, even into Wick World: when Koji, surveying the wreck of his hotel, asks John to “do me a small courtesy”, after a week with the builders in I half-expected a request for a review on Checkatrade rather than to “kill as many as you can”. And the Marquis’s power vaporised the second my friend whispered to me that he looked like Guardian columnist Owen Jones.
I liked the tracker (Shamier Anderson), an outsider who calls himself Nobody and appears like a shadow wherever John Wick is. Nobody is a man who knows his own worth, and Wick’s; his demands for millions more enrage the Marquis but are always agreed (he also has a dog which I know will swing it for a lot of you). Winston warns the Marquis “a man’s ambition should never exceed his worth”. Meanwhile Koji, one of the few who understands value, defies the High Table to honour his friendship with Wick.
Without getting too Eastenders about it, family provides these characters’ strengths and weak spots. Caine has been pulled out of retirement to kill Wick, and failure means his own daughter will be killed. Wick kills so he can get closer to his dead wife. Koji’s daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama) hates Wick because of the danger he brings to her father. (The pernickety Marquis in his aristocratic outfits clearly doesn’t have children — maybe his outsourcing of his own duel to Caine was as much to do with a hatred of mess as cowardice.)
The crime families are reliably hardened. The Roma Ruska, who plucked the orphaned boy Jardani from the streets, takes him back only when John agrees to kill the man who killed their “father”. And that wily old survivor Winston, in the first film practically John’s surrogate dad, has already shot him off the edge of a building.
The film finishes as the franchise began, with John out, Winston (Ian McShane) back at the helm of his beloved New York Continental and the High Table sailing on (though no dead dog, I can reassure you).
The High Table may be vicious but rules are rules — “without them we live like animals”, remember? — and it’s a remarkably fair organisation in its make up. It takes its ruling families from all over the world. Class, race, sex, age, and disability mean nothing. Hell, its best assassins even travel by public transport.
Such is life, as Winston and Charon quip to each other while faced with the prospect of a bullet in the head. Or as a memorial stone we see in the assassins’ graveyard states, Vivamus moriendum est: Let us live, we must die.
Note: there is an end-credits scene.
Read my article about the ending of John Wick 4 or check out the trailer below, and scroll down for links to my other John Wick franchise reviews and articles.
More John Wick
- Interview with Sambo expert Stephen Koepfer. Sambo is a Russian fighting technique developed for the military, and now a sport. Steve worked with Chad Stahelski to create a Sambo training scene in John Wick: Parabellum.
- John Wick review
- John Wick: Chapter 2 review
- John Wick: Parebellum review
- “All this, because of a puppy?” Me to me, after writing 4,000 words on the John Wick trilogy…
- Kean-who? The Doctor will see you now
- 10 Reasons why… the ultimate alt-Xmas movie is John Wick
- 10 what’s with Wick moments from John Wick 1
- Wick did what? 10 things that made me go “Whoa!” in John Wick: Chapter 2
- Podcast: I spoke to Tom Beasley from Flickering Myth about my favourite movie…
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