“Rules…without them, we live with the animals.” So goes a phrase oft-repeated by Winston (Ian McShane), manager of the stately Continental Hotel in the John Wick movie franchise. Throughout the movies, Winston and others members of his class have matched their insistence on rules with ornate locales. They rehearse their restrictions near a roaring fireplace on a New York City rooftop, within catacombs below elegant parties in Rome, or in an exclusive penthouse in Osaka.
But despite the rhetoric espoused by Winston and his fellow members of a cabal that serves a shadowy organization known as “the High Table,” no one watches John Wick movies to gawk at luxury. They flock to them for raw, brutal action. The trail of battered, brutalized bodies the title character leaves behind in John Wick: Chapter 4, opening on March 24, renders all this talk of rules and civilization an empty obfuscation, a justification for the endless violence they promote.
It’s easy to see the appeal of the John Wick franchise. The series began with 2014’s John Wick, starring Keanu Reeves and directed by former stuntman Chad Stahelski. The movie followed a fairly straightforward revenge storyline, in which the one infamous contract killer John Wick has the last remains of his domestic life torn away when a Russian gangster murders his puppy, the dying gift from his cancer-stricken wife.
Over the course of the first three movies, Wick carved a bloody path across the globe. The movies developed a byzantine mythology, not only about Wick’s past as an orphan in Belarus, adopted by Romani, but also the customs of the assassin network to which Wick belongs. And yes, that includes its many, many rules.
Clocking in at nearly three hours, John Wick: Chapter 4 is the longest of the franchise and easily the most overstuffed. The movie strains toward operatic heights, opening by intercutting between shots of Wick’s bleeding knuckles against a wooden post and a maniacal monologue from ally the Bowery King (a glorious Laurence Fishburne), a sequence that ends with a direct reference to no less than Lawrence of Arabia. It teams Wick with, and against, a colorful group of characters, including Hong Kong martial arts legend Donnie Yen, Hollywood mainstay Bill Skarsgård, and relative newcomer Shamier Anderson.
While returning director Stahelski does fill some of that space with character development, replacing the retrograde dead wife plot with surprisingly effective conversations about the nature of friendship and duty, the movie really exists to deliver fight scenes: stunning, elaborate, and— believe it or not—beautiful battles.
Borrowing from the Hong Kong tradition from which Yen comes, the fights in John Wick: Chapter 4 serve as storytelling devices. Stahelski and his collaborators stage balletic sequences in which Reeves spins around displays of ancient armor in Osaka and through fountains surrounding dancers in Berlin. A jaw-dropping sequence pits Wick against attackers in the roundabout surrounding Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, using the cars speeding around them as extensions of their bodies to deal endless damage.
More than just moments of empty violence, these sequences reveal the motivations of the characters, thanks to the cast’s outstanding physical acting. Limiting Wick to only a few lines, Reeves plays the assassin as a haggard man, weary of fighting but unsure of what to do next. He stumbles from attacker to attacker, limping toward assailants and not bothering to brush his shaggy hair from his face. He fights with an efficiency bordering on reluctance, waiting until the last minute to raise his hands or square his legs, carrying the full weight of his character’s destructive decisions.
Conversely, Japanese star Hiroyuki Sanada brings a fluidity to his scenes as Wick’s steadfast confidant Shimazu, slashing at his enemies with a katana, while British martial artist Scott Adkins is all bluster and bombast as the German gangster Killa. But the standout here is Yen as Caine, a blind assassin forced to hunt friend John Wick. Like his Chinese counterpart Jackie Chan, Yen knows how to mix Buster Keaton-style comedy into Bruce Lee-style sequences, seamlessly switching between fumbling and fighting.
Part of the movie’s appeal can be traced to the class warfare on display. In Wick’s tired eyes and battered body, we see a symbol of the worker, whose labor is controlled by arbitrary rules and used to prop an indulgent and empty culture.
Stahleski adds depth to the sequences with lush cinematography from Dan Laustsen. A mainstay of the series since John Wick: Chapter 2, Lausten gives a distinctive flavor to each of the settings. Red lights mix with white blossoms atop the Osaka hotel, underscoring the peace shared between Wick and Shimzu. The sky behind Paris’s Sacre-Coure burns as the sun rises, heightening the stakes of the movie’s climax.
As impressive as the visuals in John Wick: Chapter 4 are, there’s a certain hollowness to its proceedings. That emptiness is captured by a key scene in which Winston visits Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Skarsgård), a powerful member of the High Table. Winston meets the Marquis in a vast gallery space, walking past works by masters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio. The Marquis greets Winston during a gilded feast, where a team of servants waits on his every need.
At first glance, the scene provides a bit of shading to the movie, an easy contrast between the brutality that fills most of its runtime. But that ignores the connection between the violence and the rules insisted upon by Winston, the Marquis, and others in power. John Wick is fundamentally an enforcer, and while the movies aren’t really interested in showing him living a quiet life free from violence, they also make it clear that the punishment he gives and receives benefits the High Table. Every punch and every kick Wick delivers strengthens the High Table’s hold on the world. He and fellow combatants live and die by the rules the High Table creates—and abandon or revise—on a whim.
Part of the movie’s appeal can be traced to the class warfare on display. In Wick’s tired eyes and battered body, we see a symbol of the worker, whose labor is controlled by arbitrary rules and used to prop an indulgent and empty culture. From that perspective, John Wick: Chapter 4 can be seen as an exercise in despair, watching workers destroy one another’s bodies at the pleasure of the ruling class.
But if we pay attention to what we’re watching, we can see something exhilarating. For all the destruction signified by the action in John Wick movies, we’re actually watching people not beating on one another, but actually collaborating, working very hard to protect one another. Reeves, Yen, and their legion of stunt people constantly rehearse and collaborate to create something that looks like unbridled violence, but is, in fact, a dance, an act of cooperation.
This cooperation underscores the unexpected beauty of John Wick: Chapter 4. When workers join together, turning our tremendous energy into collaboration instead of combat, we cannot be stopped by any of the ruling class’s tools, certainly not their self-serving rules.