I hadn’t heard of Sam Peckinpah in 1988 when I saw Extreme Prejudice on HBO one night. I wasn’t even 10 and I remembered the climax as Nick Nolte as a Texas Ranger gets into a shoot-out with his old friend played by Powers Boothe who is now a drug kingpin south of the border. At the same time, Michael Ironside is an Army officer double-crossing his own legion of military commandos played by Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, Matt Mulhern and Larry B. Scott.
The double-cross syncs with a duel between the Nolte and Boothe characters as Boothe’s army watches with an arsenal to take over a foreign country. When the bullets start flying between Ironside’s character and Brown’s character as he’s discovered the double-cross, all hell breaks loose. Walter Hill had directed the movie and he 15 years earlier he had worked as a writer for Peckinpah on The Getaway. Peckinpah’s epic movie The Wild Brunch about aging cowboys in Mexico in the early 1910s was probably the most violent movie made up to that time.
Audiences had watched Bonnie & Clyde and the senseless violence as they shot people and in the end were cut down in an ambush at the end. Credits roll and the movie is over. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were shot by southern country bumpkin at the end of Easy Rider. Credits roll and the movie is over. But Peckinpah didn’t want the audience to be shocked or horrified. He wanted them to feel exhausted. I can only imagine what audiences thought in 1969 as the cowboys played by William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates walked to their certain deaths to bargain for the life of Angel (Jaime Sanchez) who had helped them but they double-crossed.
Needless to say the Mexican general and his German cohorts didn’t care what the gringos wanted and Angel, all bloody and beaten, had his throat slit to their horror. And then, the gunfire starts and it doesn’t stop for almost five minutes. That’s five minutes of cowboys in a shoot-out with Mexican soldiers. There’s no mercy. When Holden’s Pike hesitates to shoot a woman prostitute because she’s a woman, she shoots him in the back and then he turns around and fires a fatal shot calling her a “Bitch!” Oates’ character gets on a machine gun and lets out a scream that is anger, pain and even orgasmic as he fires at the soldiers.
To film this scene, they couldn’t afford the numerous extras so they would have film the same extras being shot over and over. Sometimes, they would rush the uniforms to the cleaners to get the fake blood off. Or they would shot for a different angle, so the fake blood wouldn’t show. If there was a movie that earned its R rating in 1969, it was The Wild Bunch. Hill paid homage to this scene in Prejudice only to find the climax cut apart by the ratings board to earn that R rating.
Aside from Sonny Corleone’s gruesome ambush at the toll booth in The Godfather and Travis Bickle killing pimps and corrupt cops at the end of Taxi Driver, most movie’s played it safe even when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone became rival action heros shooting and killing people regardless of where the bullets went and who they hit. It almost seemed liked they didn’t really care much. The focus was to show Arnold and Sly and as ultimate killing machines.
Only the first Die Hard seemed to care how many bullets John McClane had and how limited he was. Across the world, John Woo was creating a new action hero in Chow Yun-fat making movies like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled. Woo, along with Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark, who he worked with (and fought with) on A Better Tomorrow 2, were rewriting the action genre in ways people had never seen before. Woo was more focused on the style of the movie even though the plots to all above-mentioned movies are classic crime thrillers.
I don’t know if Woo is the first director who decided that someone should hold a handgun in each hand while shooting people, but he was the first to make it look cool and bad-ass with Yun-fat’s fierce look as he has an unlit match in his mouth. On many of the sets, they did things that were so dangerous, Yun-fat and others came close to meeting their makers. In the 1990s, when Woo made American movies like Hard Target and Face/Off, he was held back by the censors that aren’t in other countries, but he was also held back by the Hollywood system.
The John Wick movies have been the closest thing that Woo tried to achieve in America. Some would note that the Wachowskis did the same thing in The Matrix, but there’s more of a cyberpunk feel to those movies with a little bit of Woo on the side. Woo was more interested in reality. Even the face-swapping in Face/Off seems like realist to a degree. Chad Stahelski seems to understand what Woo did in Hong Kong. Woo made the violence a performance. It was something that you could watch and feel carthatic. Even if you don’t like violent movies, you can’t look away because damn, it’s so over the top and absurd, it just has to be seen.
At an outrageously long two hours and 49 minutes (including credits), John Wick: Chapter 4 continues the same story that has been told three times already. There’s really no need to discuss the plot. If you’ve seen the first three, you know what’s happened. John (Keanu Reeves) is being hunted by huge crime figures who want him dead and there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of killers out there willing to collect the huge bounty. I have to love how there are these old-fashioned film-noir style room where women of all ages sporting visible tattoos wearing skirts and tight-white blouses click on 1980s style computers as they send out notifications of the rising money for John’s capture and death. At the same time, they’re also writing on old-time chalkboards. It’s comical but also cool how this whole network exist to keep track of the contracts out for hired killers.
The John Wick movies exists in an alternate universe where neo-noir and cyperpunk has meshed with a comic-book style format like Hill’s The Warriors. And just like the radio deejay in that movie played by the late Lynn Thigpen, there’s a French radio deejay played by Marie Pierra Kakoma who sends out notifications across the airwaves as a huge bounty is put on John’s life. This is followed by a Marie Laforet doing a French cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” over an action sequence that must’ver taken weeks if not months to plan.
The movies what the Kick-Ass and Kingsman movies attempted to be. I didn’t care for those movies and even though Matthew Vaughn made a valiant attempt, he was trying too hard to be like his former collaborator Guy Ritchie. I felt Vaughn was more interested in the extent of the violence rather than the style. It’s just too much to show a person thrown into an oversized microwave like in the first Kick-Ass or that stupid gigantic meat grinder in the second Kingsmen that it turns the audience off. (It would’ve also been better to have Elton John sing “The Bitch is Back” rather than “Saturday Might’s Alright for Fighting” in that second movie too.)
It probably works best that Stahelski began his career as a stuntman in the 1990s on The Crow. Stuntmen have a different style of directing compared to other directors. Love him or hate him, but only Hal Needham could’ve made Smokey and the Bandit the way it needed to be made. Other directors would’ve been more concerned over the relationship of Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields. Stahelski knows audiences really don’t care as much about why John is doing what he’s doing. Like the Mad Max sequels, it’s basically the same premise where Max helps people get from Point A to Point B or in the case of Fury Road, back to Point A.
The premise like all previous sequels seems to begin an unspecified time follow the previous movie. The Harbinger (Brown), sporting a ZZ Top beard and missing half his ring finger, has arrived at the Continental in New York City informing manager Winston Scott (Ian McShane) because of their association with John, the High Table has condemned the Continental and set for demolition in an hour. He pulls out a huge hourglass and sets it on the desk. The foolishness of this is done with such seriousness as Scott instructs the concierge, Charon (Lance Reddick), to evacuate the building.
Scott and Charon travel to a nearby building to meet with the Marquis Vincent Bisset de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), a member of the High Table, who declares Scott an excommunicado for the failures to kill John. The Marquis fatally shoots Charon and the Continental implodes and is demolished. Such a thing even on a small building would take more than an hour to plan and implement. But here, it’s taken as something that is expected.
John has traveled to Morocco to kill a member who sits above the table. Seeing John riding a horse through the desert firing his gun at bad guys is both amazing and over the top at the same time. There’s even a close-up of John and we can tell is just Reeves against a rear-projection screen. But who cares? John later takes refuge at the Osaka Continental in Japan. But he soon discovers the Marquis has sent Caine (Donnie Yen in a scene-stealing role), an old friend and former assassin, to kill him. Also in Osaka is Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), a tracker who travels with his dog as a support-service animal. (And yes, there will come a point in the movie in which John stops a goon from shooting the dog earning some respect from Mr. Nobody.)
Also helping John is the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) who I was almost certain was killed off in the third movie. But comic-book characters are often killed off and come back with littke explanation as to why. Seeing Reeves and Fishburne again reunited only makes us wish Fishburne was cast in that fourth Matrix movie. Bowery has one of the best lines I’ve heard in a long time in which he is asked how he found a gun, Bowery responds, “I know a guy who knows a guy who shot a guy.” But Fishburne says it so matter of fact that you have to chuckle at it. Yet it’s also a look into the violent world these people live in.
While the movie could’ve been cut by about 10-15 minutes here or there, this is one of the most wonderfully shot (and for lack of a better word) executed action movies I’ve seen in a while. Stahelski has done the wise choise of working with Dan Lautsen as his director of photography. There are some scenes in this movie you just have to admire the beauty of how their handled. There’s a scene of Scott walking through an art gallery that is amazing.A meeting coordinated between the Harbinger between John and the Marquis takes place with the Eiffel Tower beautifully appearing from being the fog. A sequence of John battling goons at a night club is handled so perfectly as the patrons seem not to notice the bloodshed happening around them. And the climax is just wow! Not to give anything away, but it reminds me of the works of Conrad Hall. If Lautsen doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, there is no justice in this world.
Just like The Wild Bunch, Extreme Prejudice, Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the mostly John Woo’s Hong Kong action flicks, the John Wick movies have become a rarity in which the goal is to push it as far as you can go. What I like about this entry, which may be the best in the franchise, is that it gives the audience what it wants. There’s enough details about Caine and Mr. Nobody in their actions that you don’t really need a lot of plot exposition. And Skarsgard nails it as the Marquis.
But mostly, the movies have become a metaphor for Reeve’s career itself. In the 1990s, he became an unexpected action hero with movies such as Point Break, Speed and The Matrix. Even the not-so-good Chain Reaction and Johnny Mnuemonic solidified his status. But as the 2000s came on, he tried to branch out playing baddies in The Watcher and The Gift and taking on more lighter material like Sweet November, The Lake House and Something’s Gotta Give. But it seems audiences really turned out when he did Constantine (with a sequel in development) and and not-so-great remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Street Kings was unfairly marketed like a buddy-cop action comedy when it’s actually a dark story about police corruption. It still made some money at the box office. But The 47 Ronin in 2013 was a huge disappointment and some felt Reeves’ star was quickly fading. The concept of the first John Wick movie might have made some people feel like it was a parody. A movie about a man avenging the death of his dog? No way is this going to be a huge hit.
But audiences were swept away by it. Because it wasn’t just his dog that was killed by Russian Mafia, but the last element of his attempt at a new life following the death of his wife (Bridget Moynahan). John tried to start over but he was pulled back into the life he had wanted to escape. At 58, Reeves looks a lot better than men half his age. Not to give too much away, but the end of Chapter 4 looks like it could work as the final chapter.
Both Reeves and Stahelski have said they’re taking a break right now following the long development and production of Chapter 4 which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reportedly Reeves is scheduled to appear in a spin-off, Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas that is supposed to take place between the third movie and this one. The Creed movies, along with the Mad Max and especially the Mission: Impossible movies have proved that with the best scripts and crews, sequels can be better. Quality doesn’t have to be sacrificied. (Incidentally, Chapter 4 had a budget of $100 million which is $14 million more than the reported $86 million the first movie earned.)
With Chapter 4 making about $432 million at the box office worldwide, a fifth movie is in development. But how many more lickings can John and Reeves take on to keep on kicking?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 