Stream It Or Skip It: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ on VOD, Where Comedy and Brutality Taste Great Together

Shouldn’t’a killed his dog. John Wick: Chapter 4 (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the continuing story of a man with a thing for vengeance. He’s also a pretty decent marksman. There’s more to it, with the world-building and mythology of the overarching context, but none of it is as important as John Wick’s singular focus. What’s crucial here isn’t the why but the how – and how! – of the Wick films, with which stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski has used to elevate action movies from popcorn fodder to art, a superbly violent ballet of brutality. And audiences have followed him and fully committed star Keanu Reeves, with each film garnering larger audiences, Chapter 4 topping them all with a $427 million worldwide box office take. Of course, it gets into more of the franchise mythology, which forms a nifty basis for the stuff we’re here for, namely, the gun-fu, and to marvel at the durability of the titular action hero, and Reeves himself. 

The Gist: FIST. FIST. FIST. John Wick (Reeves) is training and the thing he’s punching is bloody from his knuckles. Wick is – get this – readying himself to kill someone. Go figure. The sun burns, the world turns, the frigid unfeeling and indifferent vacuum of space yawns into infinity, and John Wick kills. The first man he kills today is the Elder, provoking the rage of the High Table, which I believe is a secret society of some type that runs the world, but it doesn’t matter, because the group has it out for Wick and will assign a haughty and lubricious tea-sipping Frenchman known as the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard) to send a million-zillion men to Wick so that Wick may kill them. Aha! Yes, that’s the whole of everything that matters – the million-zillion hopeless men who are about to die in creative, inventive, nasty and often rather amusing ways.

I could sit here and describe how Wick uses nunchaku and a pistol to fend off one guy and then a second guy so he may headshot a third guy and go back to the first guy and fend him off then fend off the second guy then headshot the first guy then finish off the second guy, until he runs into another batch of guys. Some of the guys are head-to-toe armored, even their faces, so it’s not always easy, but Wick is hard, hard as a motherf—er gets, and he can take them all out. He has a bulletproof three-piece suit, plenty of ammo and the unceasing will of glacial motion or plate tectonics, maybe even time itself. He. Is. Un. Stopp. Able. There’s a sequence set near the Arc de Triomphe where he – get this – fights and kills some bad guys, in the midst of ceaseless traffic, and is hit by a car I-don’t-know-how-many times, leading one to assume his bones are made of steel. Keanu characterizes Wick as a weary man with aching muscles and, during a climactic sequence, a joke is made of him having to use those battered and bruised muscles to climb a massive staircase. And then he subsequently tumbles all the way down them like Homer at Springfield Gorge. So he has to climb them again. 

Where was I? Right – I could sit here and describe all this stuff and never do it justice. Good thing there’s some plot here to care about, somewhat, especially when it involves Wick’s old pals Winston (the great Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick), who are targeted by the higher-ups for their allegiances to our guy. The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) has something to do with all this, as does Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama), and the Harbinger (Clancy Brown), a guy who makes sure all the High Table’s obscure bureaucratic rules and customs are followed. More interesting are Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), a bounty hunter trying to extort the Marquis for big money to kill John Wick, a task that’s on par with, well, I already compared Wick to time itself, which will cease only with the destruction of all reality, so let’s just say Mr. Nobody has his work cut out for him. Mr. Nobody also has an awesome dog who’s tough as hell and responds to the command “nuts” by finding the nearest bad guy and emasculating him. There’s also a gent named Caine, a blind warrior played by Donnie Yen, who – wait, did they name a blind man Caine? Yes, they did. He’s an old friend of John Wick who’s now a foe of John Wick, and it perhaps goes without saying that being the former is far healthier than being the latter. Meanwhile, who’s taking care of John Wick’s dog? Sounds like a spinoff to me: John Wick’s Dogsitter. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Zatoichi films, some old Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and High Noon, Die Hard, Rumble in the Bronx or maybe Supercop, Enter the Dragon, Mad Max: Fury Road for some reason, and I’m also reminded that I’d like to rewatch Atomic Blonde and Extraction.

Performance Worth Watching: Keanu plays Wick as a man who knows he’s Going To Hell For This, and is well aware that he was put on this earth to be a killing machine, although it’s quite clear that he’s very tired about it. It’s a very modern characterization in the sense that, beneath all the savagery, he knows that all this murder just wears on the soul after a while. Marion Cobretti and Ivan Danko never had such self-awareness. 

Memorable Dialogue: Yin meets yang: 

Wick: Those who cling to death, live.

Caine: Those who cling to life, die.

Sex and Skin: No time for any of that!

Our Take: “Ballet” is the cliche word we all use in reference to the Wick films, because it’s deliciously ironic how Stahelski finds the sweet spot between choreographic grace and outright sadism. But after four of these movies, I can’t help but conclude that they’re physical comedies at heart, channeling the spirit of Jackie Chan more than ’80s and ’90s action heroes. There’s a reason the underground radio station in the films is WUXIA, because they have more in common with snapping-chopsticks martial-arts slapstick Kung Fu Theater fare. It’s the giggly thrill of one man against many, way too many; one man whose skills transcend all reason and therefore render him capable of dispatching all challengers by using his fists and trigger finger and whatever happens to be nearby, from a car to a highly convenient set of nunchucks, often in an over-the-top, absurd fashion. I feel Bruce Lee in these movies, and one invokes the name carefully. Bruce Lee inspired awe and amusement in equal measure. And even with the heavy weight of Wick’s backstory, his nothing-to-lose M.O. inspired by the loss of his wife and dog, his ingrained (and certainly learned) instinct to killkillkill, John Wick 4 made me laugh longer and harder than any of the many, many things I’ve seen in months. 

And there’s another delicious irony – finding comedy in slaughter. Maybe we’re sickos for laughing at the Wick headshot-o-rama, at all the death wrought upon the masses of idiots who dare challenge our guy, who’s not a hero, but can be pretty damn heroic in his single-mindedness, but also isn’t above letting his pain and trauma bubble to the surface and keep him motivated. Maybe that’s something to aspire to, maybe not (get a hobby that isn’t guns, Wick – may I suggest cross-stitch or animal husbandry?), but the ingeniousness of the series, storytelling-wise, is how it’s not a redemption story. No, it’s past that; he’d abandoned his previous assassin self for a quiet life of love and snuggles, but was dragged back by malicious and manipulative entities, and they had to pay for it. The danger lies in romanticizing revenge, which these films don’t necessarily do. Rather, it turns his determination into a force of nature so absurd, you can’t help but laugh. 

That, I assert, is intentional. Stahelski and Reeves are very much in on that joke, and the meta-comedy of one-upmanship. It’s hard to surpass the sheer visual exhilaration of previous Wicks, so Chapter 4 amplifies the comedy by tossing Wick down a couple hundred steps or battering a villain who looks cribbed from a Dick Tracy comic strip. (If you want one-upmanship pushed to sub-moronic extremes, feel free to suffer through the Fast and Furious movies, which are outright hacksmanship in comparison.) The director’s brand of turbocharged gun-fu often occurs in front of succulent backdrops ranging from boxy ultramodern to ultraclassical goth – the latter tied to the old-world, analog aesthetic of the underground world of assassins and puppeteers in which Wick operates. I can’t help but imagine Stahelski scouting a variety of mouth-agape locations and thinking, hey, this would be a lovely place to kill a lot of people. And we can’t help but agree.

Our Call: I can’t say whether John Wick: Chapter 4 is better or less-good than the other Wicks, but it’s easily the funniest – and that reflects the restless creativity of its makers. I think I prefer the sleek simplicity of the first movie, which was 9.8 parts direction, 0.2 parts story. Regardless, you need to STREAM IT and prep for the impending spinoffs: The Continental, a miniseries starring Mel Gibson (!) coming this fall on Peacock, and Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas as, you guessed it, an assassin out for revenge.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.