Review: John Wick: Chapter 4 is an all-out action masterpiece
The best of the best is back
God. Damn.
Calling John Wick: Chapter 4 one of the greatest action films in the history of the cinema feels like underselling it, somehow. The film’s myriad accomplishments are bigger than that. What Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves, cinematographer Dan Laustsen, production designer Kevin Kavanaugh, and every other artist involved here have achieved – what they have been building towards for nearly a decade across these four films – is a tour-de-force of kineticism on par with the silent film greats that inspired Germaine Dulac to declare ‘movement’ the essence of cinema, the definition of cinégraphie, or Jean Epstein to declare animism the soul of cinema. John Wick 4 is a deliriously thrilling action movie, yes, but it is moreover a testament to light and color and shapes in constant motion, in a breathtakingly synchronized dance, the possibilities of the art form itself made manifest in the incredible images captured and the relentless momentum with which they are strung together, pushing the viewer into a powerful out-of-body experience.
Put less prosaically: It’s possible no movie has ever kicked more ass than this one.
Chapter 4 is an ending for John Wick, just as much for the ways it feels like Chad Stahelski and company are summing up and surpassing everything they’ve done up to this point as it does for the narrative beats, which are shockingly smart, soulful, and rich in pathos this time around. Chapter 4 does at least a little of what every other film in the series did – the signature gun-fu, and hand-to-hand, and car chases, and elaborate slapstick, and so on – but pushes every part a little bit further, does it just that extra amount better, while also doing things the series has never attempted before, shifting itself into new shapes and new innovations throughout. Want proof Keanu Reeves is one of the great physical performers of our lifetimes? Look at how he handles those wooden nunchucks in the first hour. Want proof of this team’s sheer audacity? There’s a stretch of the final act that seamlessly transitions into Hotline Miami: The Movie, an unbroken overhead isometric action symphony complete with brutal techno accompaniment. Want a sense of how Chad Stahelski is conjuring the entire history of cinema’s great bodily performers, the Buster Keatons and Gene Kellys and Jackie Chans of the world who put their body through the grinder for a gasp or a laugh? Watch Keanu Reeves go all the way up the 222 steps of the Sacré-Coeur, only to fall all the way back down in excruciating detail and force himself back up to do it all over again.
Wow.
These movies have always had great characters pouring out of their ears, but Chapter 4 takes it a step further, and that’s mostly thanks to giving John his most worthy rival yet in Donnie Yen, who is essentially the co-lead here. Yen is, of course, one of the single most capable physical performers in movie history, and Chapter 4gives him ample opportunity to show off in scenes tailored completely to his singular strengths, rather than making him adjust or minimize his craft as past Hollywood productions have done. He is also just a great actor, and the bigger surprise is how much space he gets to prove that. The film runs nearly three hours long, mostly because of how thoroughly elaborate and ambitious the action is, but it also uses that space to occasionally slow down and let the actors sit with melancholy and ponder their existence, and this cast is so good that every moment like that lands pretty hard. Keanu probably has fewer lines this time around than in any of the previous chapters, but it’s possibly his best performance in the role to date, simply because of how much weary, frustrated characterization he imbues into every utterance, every motion, every blow.
I understand the impulse to resist praising John Wick 4 alongside the year’s absolute best films, especially in a year as great as 2023. I feel that resistance too; we are trained to feel it, trained to value even the most exquisite of action movies below films whose social and thematic worth we can more easily describe. But I want to fight against that resistance, because the mastery of cinematic craft on display here is truly overwhelming, is truly humbling to watch unfold as a lover of the art form. Every set in John Wick 4 is a stunner. Every action beat takes place against a backdrop so bespoke and colorful and precisely lit that it barely feels possible. Every shot is so strikingly well-composed that cuts kept taking my breath away, as each subsequent image stuns anew. The sound design is equally extraordinary – there’s a series of punches in the opening shots of this movie that might have finally overtaken Ben Burtt’s iconic punch sounds from Raiders of the Lost Ark for sheer visceral impact – and Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard have composed a killer neo-Western-techno score that feels like it’s blasting out from the walls of the mise-en-scene. John Wick 4 is an absolute marvel of a production, and in the year where the superhero genre finally collapsed in on itself after a string of ludicrously expensive yet impossibly cheap-looking bombs, this film points Hollywood in a different, better, much more exciting direction. It is not just style for style’s sake, not just action for action’s sake, but art, goddammit – big, beautiful, ambitious, audacious, thrilling art. Art that just so happens to involve shooting a whole lot of people in the head – but that also invites the viewer to participate, to lean forward in their seat, and gasp, and laugh, and feel their blood pumping harder and faster in their veins. The affective qualities of the cinema have rarely been felt so strongly as they are here.
John Wick 4 is a film so good it essentially declares itself the end of the road long before the story wraps up; it is just impossible to imagine topping this, at least with these specific characters and this specific universe, any time soon. This is the summation, and it’s glorious, and hilarious, and disarmingly melancholy at times, and deeply touching at others. It’s beautiful, and it’s brutal, and it’s shocking, and it’s profoundly affirming of this medium’s vast possibilities.
It is, in the end, John Fuckin’ Wick.
God bless ‘em.
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