John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum (2019) — The third chapter of the John Wick saga picks up exactly where the second one left off: with Keanu Reeves’ titular assassin trying to escape New York City. He’s run afoul of the High Table, the shadowy underworld conglomerate that seems to be in charge of most aspects of organized crime the world over. Wick has an hour before he becomes “ex-communicado,” with a $14 million price on his head and literally every assassin on the planet after him. So he heads to the library to check out a book, of course. Where he has to fight a knife-wielding 7-foot tall killer while armed with nothing more than the aforementioned book. As you do.
The library is just the first stop on Wick’s wild journey in this completely over-the-top third iteration of the franchise, and that book is the first of a stunning array of weapons that he uses to dispatch the hundreds of folks gunning for him. After a bit of trouble leaving the Big Apple, Wick ends up in Morocco, reunited with his one-time ally Sofia, an ex-killer who’s now running the Casablanca version of the Continental, the global network of assassins’ hotels. Halle Barry plays this new character and confidently steps into Wick’s world of wild, wanton violence. Sofia’s got a pair of trained attack dogs that work with her, which results in one of the wildest combat scenes you’ll ever see when she and Wick have to escape from a Moroccan strongman’s Casbah compound. The dizzying sequence features both actors and dogs working in perfect harmony to kill dozens (and dozens) of determined killers, and Barry proves herself more than up to the challenge of matching Reeves blow for blow.
That amazing scene is just one of the many show-stopping action set pieces featured in the flick. Director Chad Stahelski returns several times to a Belorussian ballet school run by a former Wick ally played by Anjelica Huston, underlining the connection between that discipline of movement and form and his own ballets of bullets and blood. And indeed, the fight choreography on display in John Wick 3 is at the very apex of the form, with long takes that showcase the performers’ physicality and the director’s intuitive understanding of how to present on-screen mayhem. Some of the fight scenes here rank with the best I’ve ever seen, and as a long-time fan of action flicks from all over the globe, I’ve seen quite a few. Among the highlights is an eye-popping sequence set in a hall lined with display cases filled with exotic knives, in which Wick and the baddies take turns breaking the cases and whipping knives at one another in the hallway’s tight confines. It’s absolutely wild, as is the aforementioned Casbah dust-up with Barry and her dogs. There’s a motorcycle chase with sword-wielding baddies, several intense gunfights, and a string of hand-to-hand dust-ups, including a three-person fight between Reeves and a pair of knife-wielding killers that features more broken glass than the finale of Jackie Chan’s Police Story. That’s a lot of glass!
As any film series goes on, it necessarily becomes more baroque, adding new wrinkles and subplots so as to not become a carbon copy of its predecessors. John Wick 3 suffers a bit from this, as new characters and locales pile up and drag on the film’s pace a bit. This is the first JW flick where I thought, “This is going on a little long.” I could never hold that thought for long, though, as there was always another explosive action scene ready to pop off. Reeves is once again perfect in the title role, underplaying everything even as events spiral increasingly out of control. I particularly love that whether “hiding out” in Casablanca or dying of heatstroke in the African desert, he never takes off his black tie and jacket. This is certainly the most graphically violent of the three flicks, with a lot more gruesome knife and sword injuries on display, and you can sense the filmmakers in places asking themselves how they can top what they’ve done before. Somewhat surprisingly, they keep coming up with ways to do just that. John Wick, Chapter 3 is a dizzying whirlwind of action that ends with a statement of intent that makes a fourth chapter inevitable. I can’t wait.
Leave a Reply