The success of the John Wick series – where Keanu Reeves plays a man seeking more revenge for the death of a dog than anyone in the history of cinema – is both surprising and slightly depressing.
In the past, action movies at least paid lip-service to plot, motivation and plausibility. John Wick is almost entirely stunts.
This is hardly surprising. John Wick’s two directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski are both top stuntmen. The three writers have only made action, martial arts movies, and of course Reeves has made his fair share of those too.
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In the latest John Wick – this one boasts a subtitle for a change, even if it is only Chapter 4 – our hero continues his battle against the sinister Table its seemingly endless supply of soldiers, all armed to the teeth, and the challenge to better the last movie’s body-count.
In the world of John Wick – shall we call it the Wickiverse? – if you take up arms against Wick you will be shot repeatedly.
Curiously it takes several shots to kill someone in the Wickiverse. In fact, sometimes even then…. I mean, the moustachioed leading soldier in Chapter 4 was killed several times, I thought, before he took his final, final bow.
Mr Moustache was working for the actual villain the sinister, or at least French, Marquis.
Nice to see Ian McShane playing Wick’s friend Winston, providing a certain amount of exposition – not that the John Wick movies need much in the way of exposition.
Also along for the ride, playing a character called the Bowery King, is Keanu’s old Matrix colleague Laurence Fishburne.
There’s some significance to a suit Mr Bowery hands Wick, though I didn’t spot it at the time. It seems the suit has a certain amount of bullet-proofing built into it.
This explains why, every time John Wick walks into another hail of bullets he protects himself by clutching the lapel, so most of them bounce off. If only his opponents had such a helpful tailor.
But there’s no question of that. They may attack in dozens, but the end result is always the same. John Wick manages to bump them all off in endlessly imaginative ways.
The story – or at least the narrative - of Chapter 4 involves the Marquis employed by the Table to send his hundreds of minions after Wick – the arms bill alone must run into the millions – in revenge for all the anti-Table activities in Chapters One through Three.
Complicating matters, the Marquis calls on the services of a blind Chinese assassin called Caine. Also a chap called Nobody.
Both of these are old friends of Wick, by the way. But business is business, there can be only one, you know how it is…
Nobody, interestingly, has a dog. In fact, in the Wickiverse having a dog counts as characterisation.
But it’s also a nod, of course, to the first movie which, you may remember, kicked off when Wick’s own dog ceased to be.
John Wick has also revived the cool one-liner, which used to be a staple of all those action movies of the past.
I suspect Keanu may have written these himself, since the rest of the writers’ room has been busy devising endless new stunts. The stunts, incidentally, are undeniably pretty cool.
So - is this the end of John Wick? All the signs are that it is. But if blockbusters have taught us anything, it’s that nobody’s so dead they can’t be revived if the money’s right.