Boy are these movies garbage. It baffles me how many people love them. Okay, the first John Wick was a bit of fun. Who doesn’t love watching a guy whose puppy was killed, going scorched Earth on all the bad guys responsible? Every other film in the series has been awful. And if you disagree, well…you probably get to enjoy life watching Bruce Lee, Van Damme, Segal, and Chuck Norris films, too. I like a bit more than dumb fight scenes when I go to the movies. And don’t come at me with “But these fight scenes are so well choreographed and blah blah blah.” Who cares?! I’m not going to spoil things when I tell you in this movie that he fights about 250 people; falls out of a three story building onto a van; falls down 250 stairs and breaks a bone (at least we hear a crack when he hits the bottom); gets hit by three cars (two of which send him 10 feet backwards hitting another car); is stabbed and shot…yet he is still able to beat up the bad guys approaching him.
As a kid, a man moved into my neighborhood named Bill Marvin. He trained boxers for the Marines (the newspaper did a big story on him once). I always loved the sweet science and he started teaching me to box. I remember the first time he made me keep my hands/arms up, as he peppered me with jabs. Sure, he was 6’2” and strong, and I was just a wee lad, but even when he wasn’t hitting me…just keeping my arms up to protect my head, tired me out to the point where I couldn’t lift them anymore. And that’s not even taking into account that…when you’re punching someone with a bare hand, you could break bones or inflict pain on your hands. Yet we’re supposed to put all those thoughts aside as Wick continues to beat people repeatedly.
And on top of that, it’s just gotten so stupid, all these various rules they’ve thrown at us for the High Table and the Continental, and all these contract killers that listen to a stupid radio station telling them they’ll get $40 million if they kill Wick. Seriously, where do they get all this money? It’s all so ridiculous. And I sat there and watched this three hour movie of idiocy.
Here’s the story, or what I could remember from it. Winston Scott (Ian McShane) is told to close the shop. He and his concierge Charon (Lance Reddick, who passed away just last week) are called to a meeting by Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), who’s the big cheese. They demolish the building and are told Wick needs to be stopped. We see Wick hiding out at another Continental hotel in Tokyo, run by Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter/concierge Akira (Rina Sawayama). The Marquis needs to hire a blind swordsman named Caine (Donnie Yen), since nobody else is able to stop Wick. Surely a blind dude would be able to (okay, I admit…it is kind of fun watching him use his sword as a walking cane). There was a character that was mildly amusing. He’s a highly skilled tracker (Shamier Anderson), and he’s interested in the bounty. He uses a dog that’s not quite as cute as the one Wick had in the first film. I was always surprised that when he’d shoot one of the other assassins, as the dog was chewing him up, how the sound of the gun didn’t scare the crap out of the dog. I mean, dogs freak out at fireworks going off five miles away when they’re inside a house, but I digress.
And because I hate these movies so much, it makes me also dislike the fact that Keanu Reeves wears a black tie the entire time, or that he can’t grow a proper beard, and seems to struggle even uttering one line of dialogue (it’s one of the reasons he was so perfectly cast as the dopey boyfriend in Parenthood almost 25 years ago).
If I was 12-years-old, still being trained to box by Bill Marvin, perhaps I’d love this movie. I mean, I got really good with nunchucks and some of my friends thought I was a black belt because of that. So I smiled watching Wick use them, and the way after dispatching someone with them, he’d quickly sling them around his neck like a scarf. The other weapons brought in – axes, arrows, and throwing stars – not as interesting. The action sequences also got so repetitive. Even when they came up with something new and interesting – fighting in Paris in the Arc de Triomphe roundabout – that went on too long and got old quick (I was also perplexed as to why cars weren’t slowing down or stopping, if they saw 20 people throwing punches at each other but hey…that wouldn’t make it as fun when a car going 70 mph smashed into one of the bad guys).
There’s a fight on a stairway that’s so stupid, it felt like some dumb video game. In fact, one scene is so utterly ridiculous, that the critic next to me laughed hysterically at just how stupid the scene was of Wick falling down stairs (although I see some early reviews praising this garbage, so who knows).
My wife was smart enough to decline going with me to the press screening, so I brought a friend who was eager to go. He was excited to see martial arts fighter Scott Adkins, playing a character called Killa dressed in a fat suit with bizarre gold teeth. Yet even the sight of that I thought was goofy. It was like a cheesy Bond villain, or someone from Sin City or Dick Tracy.
I’m willing to let a lot of stuff go when watching an action picture. It never bothered me in Bond films that none of the bullets hit 007, yet he can take out all the bad guys. Yet I do think it’s much more effective when one person takes everyone out, and it feels remotely believable (the scene that comes to mind is Clint Eastwood shooting Gene Hackman and the other cowboys in Unforgiven).
This is more of the same, so if you’re a fan of the John Wick series, you’ll be in heaven. If you’re not, you can avoid sitting in a theatre for three hours.
1 star out of 5.