John Wick: Chapter 4. MA15+, 169 minutes. 3 stars
Very long, very violent, the latest and probably last in this noir assassin film franchise is also very fun.
And hooly dooly, this latest John Wick is a whole lotta film and so long that my parking ticked over from affordable to ridiculous, but luckily the film was so enjoyable I'm only mildly resentful about that.
The first John Wick film was a fairly simple thing - an immaculately dressed retired assassin comes out of retirement and kills everyone even vaguely involved in the death of his beloved dog.
The film did so well at the box office, compared to its low budget, that we've been gifted with three more films, each increasingly elaborate in budget and ambition.
This fourth time around we get a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo about the league of assassins that Wick once left, not a lot of which makes sense, but it all sets up a series of gorgeous tableaux to play out violent fight scenes.
The High Table are an Illuminati meets the Masons meets the yakuza crime organisation, the group that assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) once wronged and who still control his life and that of many of the world's top assassins.
Sitting at the head of the High Table is Marquis (Bill Skarsgard), a wealthy sociopath puppet-master who hates John Wick and the danger this loose cannon represents to his grip on power.
Marquis sets in motion a series of plots to end Wick's life, starting with taking away the power from Winston (Ian McShane), head of the American chapter of this shady assassin cabal.
Marquis puts a bounty on Wick's head which draws money-hungry killers out of the woodwork to hunt Wick, including Tracker (Shamier Anderson), and he also blackmails one of Wick's only friends, blind Chinese assassin Caine (Donnie Yen) into turning on his friend.
John Wick first discovers the many threats to his life when he visits friend Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada) at his hotel in Osaka and, surviving assaults on multiple fronts, he visits Berlin and then Paris on a journey that will eventually end in a duel with Marquis on the steps of the Sacre Coeur in Paris.
Former stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski really knows what the fans of this franchise want and he serves it up on a platter. The fight scenes are superlative in their staging, but then I grew up on the Japanese kids' show Monkey, so any on-screen fight scene where the bad guys don't just patiently wait their turn to get beaten up seems clever to me.
The location budget gets a workout, with rooftops in Osaka, a brutalist concrete disco in Berlin, and iconic Paris locales you know so well getting used in inventive ways. Some of the set pieces include a multiple bounty hunter gun fight around and around the Arc de Triomphe and a thorough brutalising of Reeves up and down the stairs of Montmartre, and it's all so much fun to watch.
Stahelski knows his Hong Kong cinema and John Wick: Chapter 4 is part spaghetti western and many parts implausible martial arts of the films of Tsui Hark or John Woo, or even a low-rent Kurosawa. John Wick isn't a superhero, he hurts, he bleeds, and if it wasn't for his Teflon-lined tuxedo, provided by this film's version of Q (Laurence Fishburne), the film would be over a lot sooner.
Reeves gives more of the super-chill guy we love, though the most fun looks to be had by Skarsgard whose Marquis dresses in immaculate costuming. He camps and vamps through his role.
The production must have been a dream for the stunt coordinators and FX and CGI teams who got to make these implausible violent fights both believable and fun, and the film is lit like a neon dream.
