REVIEW: ‘John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum’ is almost too much of a good thing
Keanu Reeves faces off against new enemies in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, directed by Chad Stahekski.
There are some folks out there who take it upon themselves to be our pop-culture accountants. They count up the things in movies and TV shows that we sometimes wonder about but don’t have the time to figure out for ourselves, like the millions of dollars in property damage in the Fast and Furious movies, or in the case of shoot-em-ups and horror movies, the body count. Just how many evil goons did our hero dispatch? Sometimes it’s an itch that demands to be scratched.
Thanks to these fine fans, we now have a number for the John Wick franchise: 306. That’s how many people Wick (Keanu Reeves) fatally shoots, stabs, chokes, or kicks in the head with a horse (yes, really). It’s an absurd number, one that amazingly outdoes both the Halloween and Friday the 13th series put together.
If you’re able to set aside the disgust that such a huge number of casualties might prompt, it does help put the John Wick movies into perspective. This series is the definition of action-thriller excess; a franchise that exists in a wildly exaggerated world where a shootout or a stabbing in some of New York’s most famous locations barely causes the crowds to flinch. It’s a world where it feels like every tenth person is secretly an elite assassin, and an elaborate network of institutions, rules, and bureaucracy exists to impose order on the messy business of killing people for money.
Halle Berry as Sofia, along with one of her very good dogs.
But having such a pile of dead bodies also indicates one of the only problems with the latest installment of the franchise, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. The movie adds 167 deaths on its own - more than half the total - many of which come in lengthy, technically dazzling scenes whose only crime is that there’s too much of them. It sounds odd, but for all the thrills and grim laughs in Chapter 3, the movie could do with being 10 or 15 minutes shorter. The chops would go to some battle scenes that make their point earlier on, only to keep hammering it home. I’m reminded of a scene late in the film, when two of the martial artists from the Raid movies (Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman) throw Wick repeatedly into glass display cases, shattering one after another. Wick gets up every time, and his survivability becomes a joke - Wick is every bit a comic book superhero as Captain America or Superman, albeit less cheerful.
The same can be said of a well-choreographed but overlong fight in a Moroccan facility in the second act. Wick teams up with a former assassin colleague named Sofia (Halle Berry), who comes to the fight with two impeccably trained Belgian Malinois that tear up the enemy just as well as their human co-stars. Everything about the scene is fun to watch, but the constant stream of faceless baddies does get a bit tedious after a while. Even in the hyperbolic world of John Wick, you begin to wonder why the bad guys keep running into a killing floor without changing their tactics.
Mark Dacascos as Zero.
Still, the overall experience of Chapter 3 is just as good as the previous two installments. The pitch-black sense of humour is still here, and it’s enhanced by the appearance of two new faces: Asia Kate Dillon (Showtime’s Billions) as a nameless Adjudicator sent to enforce the laws of the hitman community, and Mark Dacascos as a hitman with a fanboy-ish devotion to Wick’s work. (Seriously, go check out Dacascos in Brotherhood of the Wolf - a cult-classic martial-arts fantasy movie from 2001).
The pulpy, noirish flavour of the Wick movies is unlike anything else in the action genre at the moment. The precise details of the plot don’t really matter; it’s just fun to see this kind of filmmaking executed (pun not intended) so well, with practical effects and wide-shot fights, at a time when many directors are still relying on quick cutting and CGI to pull off their scenes.
Considering how many references to classic films like The General and Un Chien Andalou are inserted into the Wick universe, the series feels like a twisted but honest successor to those works. The movies may be separated by 90 years, but they’re made with the same do-it-for-real spirit. If the worst thing these movies can do is give us too much of themselves, then I’m all for another round.
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum gets three and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
We get to see Charon (Lance Reddick) in action! I was honestly worried about him when he went out to defend the Continental.
Every armchair gun expert and YouTube science fan will feel validated by a scene in a pool in the third act.
I want some really big name cameo casting for the High Table members in the (now-confirmed) Chapter 4 in 2021.