John Wick: Chapter 4

Goood movie! It’s 2 hours and 50 minutes long, and it’s a movie that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a fighting movie.

The Matrix in 1999 brought us a certain film innovation called “bullet time.” It’s a technique where you position several cameras in a circle around the person that you are filming, and you splice all the recordings taken from those cameras into one contiguous clip to produce a 360 degree view of the action. Well, we all wondered when we would next get to see something along the same lines that would be just as fresh and new as “Bullet Time” was, in the current year of 2023, and here it is. Something neat.

A unique top down view of an action sequence, with John Wick taking out a floor full of bad guys with an incendiary shotgun. Does this remind you of isometric video games such as Path of Exile or Lost Ark?

The movie features 2 of my favorite actors, Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada. You might know Donnie Yen from films such as XXX: Return of Xander Cage, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. And you might know Hiroyuki Sanada from films such as Mortal Kombat 2021, and The Wolverine. Lawrence Fishburn is in the film, as well as Lance Reddick. You know Lawrence Fishburn from the 3 Matrix films, and you know Lance Reddick from Oz, Lost, and Fringe. Ian McShane is here as well. Shamier Anderson is new, and Bill Skarsgard plays the role of the Marquis. There’s also a new actress named Rina Sawayama who I thought was kinda attractive.

The fighting sequences are a little bit slower than what I remember seeing from the first three films, but honestly no one is supposed to move with superhuman speeds, and so this gives the film a touch of realism.

Almost every single foe in this film does not go down with just one punch. It takes several punches, and hits, and stabs, gunshots, car collisions, axe to the face, and flaming shotguns. The movie respects your taste in films by making John’s foes hard to kill; and thus believable.

The only bad thing that I can say about this film is this:

About 4/5ths of the way through, this person shows up and starts spamming the movie with an unsultry nouveau couture drawl of a radio DJ, whose face we don’t even get to see. I like seeing who it is that I’m meant to be paying attention to, and obviously the film’s producers wanted me to focus keenly on this person speaking. Yet they didn’t show me her eyes at all. It felt shoe-horned and out of place.

Otherwise, the film gets near perfect marks. 80’s cinema gave us a lot of martial arts films to choose from, and John Wick: Chapter 4 continues this tradition by giving us a focused fighting film that fits right in with 2023.

And on a personal note, watching this film didn’t make me wish to be young again; it made me feel right at home, right here, in this day and age.