Watching John Wick: Chapter 4 is a bit like coming across a jewel made up of huge diamonds held together by Sellotape. If that sounds like a rather lukewarm endorsement, it isn’t necessarily so. For a decade, the Wick franchise has been the Bolshoi of action cinema. Even relative to those already high standards, the numerous fights, shoot outs, car chases, and blends thereof in its fourth instalment are a dramatic step up both in scope and style. In particular, the film culminates in an extended, constantly mutating sequence which seems to span the whole of Paris. It starts as a fairly standard street battle, before becoming a frenetic fight amidst the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, an artful overhead oner of Wick shooting his way through a building, then up (and frequently down) down the long staircase leading to Sacré-Cœur, followed by a climactic duel. It is quite the adrenaline shot.
Sadly, the rest of the film undercuts the quality of the action. Granted, it is stylishly shot and the film benefits from a quality cast. However, the liberal application of sumptuous cinematography and big acting, often seem to be masking the flimsiness of the structure those amazing sequences are embedded in. Usually, in these reviews I’d summarise the plot. However, John Wick 4’s is so obviously a pretext for the action, that doing so seems beside the point. The characters seem more like a collection of archetypes, stereotypes and plot functions than an attempt to create real seeming people. They have very straightforward, perhaps even simplistic, motivations. Yet these somehow fail to coherently explain their actions. They often seem like part of the film’s aesthetic rather than its story. I know there are people who are really excited about the worldbuilding of this franchise but I’m not among them. Rather than a society in which assassins play a role, the world of Wick is apparently composed of and/or entirely geared towards assassination as an end in itself. It’s all a bit a silly.
Now, it is also perfectly possible to blend iconic action with engaging characters, stories and ideas. The Matrix is perhaps the most obvious example given that we’re discussing a film starring Keanu Reeves. Nor does a great action film necessarily require great characters, plot or worldbuilding. For example, the Raid doesn’t devote much time to any of these. However, the fact it moves swiftly over them to get to the action is rather the point. Because it handles them so economically, they do not get in the way of enjoying the action. However, John Wick 4 has a, frankly excessive, 2 hr 49 min runtime. A lot of this is action. But a lot is a famous character actor grandiloquently spouting pseudo-profound nonsense like they’re in one of Zack Snyder’s DCEU films.
That the Wick films would go in the direction of ever more brilliant action and ever less convincing everything else was not predetermined. Indeed, there is a film adjacent to the franchise that illustrates why it is preferable that action is in the service of story rather than the other way round.
2021’s Nobody has the same writer and producer as the original John Wick. Given that, it unsurprisingly also features a similar style of action. There are also a number of similar plot beats: a retired assassin, Russian mobsters, said mobsters realising they’ve pissed off the wrong guy, carnage ensuing, aforementioned assassin finding a new adorable pet at the end of film. In this case, the story focuses on Hutch Mansel (Bob Odenkirk). He is apparently an unassuming and put upon suburban dad gradually fading into the background of his own life. However, a burglary at his family home prompts him to dust off skills as a former special ops killer for “three letter agencies” and in the process to make an enemy of a fearsome crime boss (Aleksey Serebryakov).
Though Nobody features some great action set pieces, notably a brutal brawl on a bus, I’m not going to claim they come close to the spectacle of the John Wick 4. However, it has a number of advantages which none of the Wick films really do. For starters, though not exactly a naturalistic film, it is grounded in a world near enough to ours, that it is not encumbered by the need to explain its own mythology. That makes it a nimbler, and less pompous, film.
However, probably the most significant difference is in the central character. I’m not going to deny Reeves brings a lot to the role of John Wick nor that this goes beyond his willingness to train to the point he can do the action himself. His distinct blend of understatement and intensity sells the idea of Wick as supremely competent at what he does. That said, I doubt even the most devout Keanu stan would claim he’s a better actor than Odenkirk. Who lest we forget arrived part way through a season of what is generally accepted to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time and still managed to not only immediately energise the whole enterprise, but to make such an impact that he eventually became its focus.
Nobody makes effective use of his dramatic range, presenting a convincing picture both of a professional killer and a suburban dad, and the tension of these being two halves of a single character. At some level, John Wick is supposed to embody the same tension. The fourth film makes a lot of the idea that as much as Wick wants an ordinary life, being a killer is in his nature. Neither Reeve’s performance nor the script for any of these films especially sell this duality. We never get much sense of who Wick would be if he was not a killing machine. I know we see videos and flashbacks of him with his tragically dead wife before she succumbs to tragically-deceased-spouse-syndrome but that seems a bit perfunctory.
Showing the dissonance between the two sides of the man also makes Odenkirk’s Mansell a funnier character. For example, there’s a running joke about how having grievously wounded goons, he attempts to have a fatherly heart to heart with them, complete with rambling anecdotes, only to discover his interlocutor has died mid-soliloquy. By contrast, the humour in the Wick films tends to be quite slapstick and I’m not sure is always entirely intentional.
More fundamentally, the ability to sustain for the film’s runtime the illusion that the characters are in some sense real, goes to how engaging it can really be. Legendary comics writer Alan Moore advised prospective authors to “always remember that the plot is not the story. It is just what gets you from one end of the story to the other. For example, the plot of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – some animals take over a farm – is not what the book is about.” On paper, John Wick: Chapter 4 is about something. There’s an attempt to evoke themes of redemption and fatalism. However, it never for a moment makes you believes its plot, characters or faux pathos are about more than getting from one cool visual to the next sick action beat. Nobody, by contrast, makes a case that it is about real seeming – as distinct from realistic – characters. Hence, the collision of hitman and crime boss appears imbued with actual human stakes which give the bullets, punches and crashes a weight that only story, not spectacle, can imbue them with.
Matter Of Facts 