Review: John Wick: Chapter 4

Many things happen in the nearly three hours it takes the new John Wick movie to unfurl. Many, many things. Among them:

There’s a spectacular eruption of kung fu, gun fu, car fu, and WTF fu as our man Wick (Keanu Reeves) circles around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, desperately wrestling the wheel of a careening muscle car whose driver’s side door has been ripped off and windshield blown out while bullets and bodies fly all around him. This is truly an incredible scene, packed with the sort of uproarious detail that action-mad Wickophiles have come to savor.

A little later, also in Paris, Wick is wearily making his way up the 200-some stone steps leading to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre when, suddenly, a battalion of bad guys swarms out and hurls him back down those steps, watching appreciatively as he bumps and rolls down to the bottom. There, he somehow gets on his feet again and comes charging back up at his attackers, maximum damage clearly foremost in his mind. This is one of the most amazing stunt sequences I’ve ever seen at the movies, reminiscent in a more maximal way of the best of the Bourne films and even George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

I could go on about the delicious little glimpses of over-the-top mayhem to which we’re treated in this movie: Wick bracing a luckless thug’s head on a table while he whales away at it with a set of nunchucks; a newbie named Akira (Rina Sawayama) hanging onto the back of a fleeing psychopath as he crawls up a staircase and plunging a pair of long knives into him at each step.

This is top-drawer pandemonium, whipped up by a gifted director (stunt king Chad Stahelski) and a highly colorful cast. Returni