John Wick Chapter 4 ***1/2

REVIEW:

Still stylish, still cool, still filled with incredible action, this entry is the first of the four to actually feel kind of tired. It’s a good movie, but it gets hurt by its massive length. At three hours, no action movie should ever be that long and expect the audience to not get restless. This is one of those movies where if you watch it all at once, it’s impossible to not get desensitized to the action and maybe even a little bored. But watched at home, dividing up the sequences and taking them at your own pace definitely helps one appreciate what they’re doing a little more. The action is cool as always, and features new weapons (nunchucks, dragon breath ammo in shotguns which basically turns them into flamethrowers,) but the story does seem to be going over the same ground. In that way, it’s not like the other three, which truly expanded the story. and the world. The action gets really good here, in the final third of the film, set in Paris. Between the Arc De Triumph car sequence and the mansion which is shot fantastically from overhead points of view, there are some very cool scenes. But this is also the part of the movie where the injuries John Wick undergoes nearly put this film into parody territory. Particularly with a fall out of a window and then a crazy stairs sequence. The movie is fine, and entertaining, and one thing that does make each entry feel like it’s own thing is that each one brings in new characters that are only there for that film. This time we get Bill Skarsgard as the Marquis, and Donnie Yen as a blind assassin. The story feels both too repetitive and too long, but the action and style are still a lot of fun.