John Wick returns – Newspaper Kommersant No. 51 (7496) of 03/25/2023

John Wick 4 by Chad Stahelski, the continuation of the popular action franchise about an unkillable but deadly hitman played by Keanu Reeves, was released on the screens. This is a rare guest at the Russian box office today: the freshest Hollywood blockbuster with stars, high critical acclaim and impressive box office. For the fourth time I could not share the general enthusiasm Yulia Shagelman.

The first John Wick, the directorial debut of former stuntmen and stunt coordinators Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, was released in 2014. It was an old school story in the spirit of the 1980s about a retired hitman who takes revenge on the bad guys for a stolen car and a murdered dog. No one expected anything special from the film, shot for a modest $ 20 million, but it unexpectedly paid off at the box office four times, returned Keanu Reeves to the status of an undisputed action star and formed a devoted fan base of those who are ready to watch all the same things again with slight variations. The second John Wick (2017) already cost $40 million and earned $171 million at the global box office, the third (2019) was filmed for $55 million and brought its creators almost $328 million. As budgets increased, so did the timing: if the first film fit into 101 minutes, then the third lasted already 130, while the fourth is impressive in size, more suitable for some “Godfather” or “Lord of the Rings” – 169 minutes. A significant part of them, of course, is what John Wick is watched for: fights, chases and gunfights.

Over time, the franchise has lost the already conditional attachment to reality, which she had at the very beginning. In the first film, the title character was still visited by the police and specially trained corpse cleaners, and during his rushing around New York in search of bad representatives of the Russian mafia that offended him, he sometimes came across quite ordinary people. In the second, it turned out that the entire population of the city, to the last homeless person, is in a secret society of assassins, who, obviously, in the absence of other customers and victims, amuse themselves by killing each other. In the third part, the geography of the fictional murderous universe expanded to Morocco and Rome. In the fourth, Osaka, Berlin and Paris were added to them. The latter is represented on the screen by the most recognizable sights – the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Sacré-Coeur church, against which the very fights, chases and shootouts take place. A new antagonist, hungry to piss off John Wick as if he hadn’t been taught anything by previous installments, is the French aristocrat, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), who is headquartered in the Louis Vuitton Foundation, has breakfast in Versailles, and has villainous conversations in galleries, in front of canvases like “Freedom on the Barricades” and “The Raft of the Medusa”.

By tradition, the authors gave notable parts to the legends of the action genre. In the new film, they play another of Wick’s old friends we’ve heard about for the first time: Hiroyuki Sanada, the manager of the Continental hotel for assassins in Osaka, who sides with John in his confrontation with the Marquis; Donnie Yen is a blind martial artist who, on the contrary, is hired by the Marquis to punish the hero. There is also a hitman nicknamed Nobody (Shamir Anderson), who is responsible for something hitherto unseen and unheard of in the franchise – humor. Although, basically, both he and the rest of the characters have to conduct dialogues consisting of phrases like “He takes life and gives death” or “The dead are dead, but the living continue to live” and fill in the pauses between battle scenes.

Alas, the latter came out this time so bloated that neither changing locations, nor new tricks, nor shooting in one frame can save. When you wish the main character not victory, but that his suffering is finally over, it’s time to remember some other philosophical saying and close the shop. But the dead are dead, and the John Wick team is already preparing a fifth film, spin-off and mini-series based on them.