John Wick Chapter 4 review: Keanu Reeves’ biggest, bloodiest, most personal action orgy yet

The air is thick with tragedy and pain in John Wick: Chapter 4. Perhaps even more than the previous three films, here the stakes feel personal and the consequences real. I’m not sure if Chapter 4 is the strongest of the, thus far, fantastic four-film franchise. It’s certainly a worthy contender alongside Chapter 1. At almost three hours, it’s also the longest one yet. What I am certain of is that this movie captures the spirit of this film series like none of its predecessors. Of friendship and consequences. Of connection and its cost.

After where things were left at the end of Chapter 3, for John (the inimitable, wonderfully internal Keanu Reeves), it’s now at war with The High Table. The end of the last movie saw John decide to go back on his agreement with The Table to side with Winston. Only to then be shot by Winston and thrown off the roof of the New York Continental, just barely making it out alive. Choosing friendship almost cost him his life. It’s a running theme in Chapter Four. Friendship and consequences.

John is on a warpath. There’s an intentionality to his actions and kill count this time that we haven’t seen since the first movie. No longer is he on the kill-or-be-killed back foot as he was in Chapters 2 and 3. There’s even more of a cold, enraged emptiness behind Keanu’s eyes here. As if what few strands of humanity he had left are dwindling. Baba Yaga is back. And he’s out for blood. But, as he’s asked repeatedly through the film by the few friends and allies he has left, what’s his endgame? Where does this all end?

The Table has sent a new top-dog general to end the John Wick epidemic and the threat he poses to their order. In Chapter 3 we got Asia Kate Dillon’s The Adjudicator. This time we get a figure known as The Marquis (a fittingly unnerving Bill Skarsgård making a strong case to be the next great Bond Villain). John has become something of a virus against The High Table’s brutally-enforced system. A product of their own making that threatens to end their reign. It immediately made me think of The Matrix’s Agent Smith. (It’s one of many parallels and nods to The Matrix Trilogy, my favourite being watching John wait for a train at an empty train station, echoing The Matrix Revolutions). But unlike Agent Smith, here, the infection John represents is his humanity.

It makes you wonder – just what is it that makes John Wick so special? Is it simply that he’s the most gifted killer in a world full of them? His ability to take a historic beating and still get up and trudge on? Or that he somehow manages to make his friends – ruthless assassins in an unforgiving world – hesitate, and think twice before carrying out orders, thereby acting against their own survival? Be it Ian McShane’s Winston, Halle Berry’s Sofia Al-Azwar in Chapter 3 or Hiroyuki Sanada’s Shimazu (manager of the Osaka Continental) in this film. Even the affectionate way the late, great Lance Riddick’s The Concierge looks at him. John inspires compassion in a world that demands the lack of it.

Here, to take down John once and for all, The Marquis enlists the services of another of John’s old friends’ – Caine, played by martial arts maestro Donnie Yen, who creates perhaps the franchise’s greatest character after John himself. Caine is blind, but it doesn’t limit his ability to kill. He hacks and slashes with sparkling finesse and a quick, quiet grace. This is a dude that’ll stab you and walk away before you even realise what’s happened. And Yen knows exactly when to be irreverent and when to be human. Much like he did in Rogue One, he may have been hired for his impressive born-for-the-movies physical prowess, but it’s the beating heart and endearing presence he awards his characters that make them shine.

Like him, Chapter Four offers arguably the franchise’s most memorable characters yet. Aside from returning figures like The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne having a blast here, bringing a much-needed dose of flamboyance into this bleak, self-serious world), we get new scene-stealing killers like Killa. He’s the scenery-devouring German nightclub owner played with a playful glee by Scott Adkins, who joins the ranks of Colin Farrell’s Penguin on the list of actors who masterfully marry prosthetics with performance. There’s also a mysterious-to-a-fault new assassin on the scene called The Tracker (a compelling Shamier Anderson). But he seems to have little purpose here aside from making himself known to us and no-doubt showing up in future instalments of this expanding universe (they’ve already greenlit a spin-off show called The Continental and a spin-off movie called The Ballerina starring Ana de Armas).

I’m not sure if John Wick: Chapter 4 earns its length. There’s a certain weary, repetitiveness that’s set into the stakes and story by this point, with the last two films feeling like they go in circles to some degree. For example, a scene where The Marquis tells John that, deep down, he wouldn’t know what to do with freedom from The Table because being a killer is who he really is. It’s the same exchange we got in Chapter 3 between John and The Elder in the desert. There’s also something convoluted about the rules of this otherwise electric world. When they seem to back themselves into a corner, writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch seem to invent new rules of how John can earn his freedom back, to give him an excuse to go on a new killing spree. Also, how exactly do John and his fellow badasses travel around the world so frequently? Is there an “assassin airlines”? Does John watch in-flight movies? Food for thought.

But, narrative nitpicking aside, ultimately what we come to these movies for is their unrelenting, killer kinetic energy. And, on that front, Chapter Four offers the grandest action orgy yet, with the most creatively choreographed carnage thus far. More than just the same old guns and knives, here we get some bombastic bow and arrow action, a nunchuck sequence for the ages and even some serious death by traffic. The last forty minutes in particular, set in Paris, is pure bravura bloodshed with two of the finest hand-to-hand set pieces I’ve seen in recent memory. There’s a breathtaking top-angle one-take sequence through an apartment building and a final heart-stopping fight sequence on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. It’s a testament to how the stellar action work in these movies is so steeped in their setting across museums, rooftops and nightclubs. As if these sequences could never take place anywhere else. Every element lives in service of the action. Such as the say-less-do-more approach to dialogue which makes the lines hit harder (pun intended), or how cinematographer Dan Laustsen plays with shadow and light. Heck, even the bloody subtitles are drenched in swag.

With John Wick: Chapter Four, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski cements the legacy of this series as among the purest, most stylish action movies ever made. Time and again, the John Wick movies prove that, in the right hands, action is an art form. Every stab a painting.