John Wick: Chapter 4

Chad Stahelski’s fourth film about John Wick has the same plot as the other three. A man in a black suit wants to be left alone, an organisation will not allow it, and he shoots his way through several hundred of its employees to make the point. What has changed is the scale. This one runs 170 minutes, visits Osaka, Berlin and Paris, and stages four or five action sequences as good as any we have seen in this kind of film. Between them it sits in dim rooms and talks about rules, and it talks for far too long.

The action first, because it is why anybody is here. Kevin Kavanaugh builds the Osaka Continental as a hotel that is half museum, all glass cases and gold screens and a gallery floor of standing armour, and then lets the fight wreck it a room at a time. Dan Laustsen lights every one of those rooms so that we can see who is standing where, which sounds like a small thing and is the thing most action films cannot manage. Hiroyuki Sanada’s Shimazu fights with the patience of a man who owns the building. Donnie Yen’s Caine, who cannot see, fights with door chimes and motion sensors and a blade, and the choreography makes his blindness a weapon rather than a handicap.

Paris is better still. There is a sequence shot from directly above, the camera gliding over the roofless rooms of a derelict building while John moves through it with an incendiary shotgun, that plays like a floor plan come to life. There is a fight in the Paris traffic in which the cars are the weapons and the drivers do not slow down. And there is a staircase, a long one, which John has to climb with the whole underworld coming down it. We laughed out loud at what happens on that staircase, and a minute later we were leaning forward on the sofa with our hands clenched. Nathan Orloff holds these shots long enough that we see every fall land, and the falls are staged so that every one hurts.

Yen is the best thing in the film. He plays Caine as a man doing a job he despises for reasons he will not discuss, sits down to eat noodles between rounds, and is the only character whose relationship with John costs either of them anything. Bill Skarsgård’s Marquis is a study in entitlement, a young man who has never been told no, and Skarsgård enjoys the accent and the cuffs. Scott Adkins turns up in Berlin as Killa, and the nightclub he runs, with waterfalls indoors and dancers who do not stop for gunfire, is Kavanaugh’s other great set. Reeves says fewer words than most leading men manage in a trailer and falls down more than most stuntmen. His face is the face of a man who would like to sit down, and that is the performance.

The trouble is the talking. Michael Finch and Shay Hatten’s script keeps returning to the same conversation: John cannot be free, there is one way out, the terms are these. Ian McShane’s Winston and Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King deliver the lore with relish, Lance Reddick’s Charon with grace, and Clancy Brown arrives as the Harbinger to add more of it. Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard score these scenes with the same low thump they use for the fights, so that a man reading out a rulebook sounds as urgent as a man being thrown through a window. Somewhere in the second hour we looked at the clock, and in a film built entirely to stop us doing that, this is a fault. Berlin is where it sags; the club is spectacular and the reason for being there is thin.

Against the series’ own standard, this is the biggest and not the tightest. Against the genre’s, it is a lesson. Most Hollywood action is cut to hide what the actors cannot do; Stahelski’s is cut to show what his can, in long takes, with the geography intact. Paco Delgado’s suits stay buttoned through all of it, which is the film’s one running joke and a good one.

See it on the largest screen you can find, and give yourself an interval; the film does not, and it should have. It is certified 15, and the certificate is earned inside the first ten minutes.