The third installment in the John Wick saga falters and slips following in the footsteps of its predecessors. While the two earlier entries in the series contained their fair share of violent action, they also hid a buried a sense of subtelty and mystery lying just underneath all the gun fire and blood spatter. Here, however, it’s all about one over-the-top action sequence after another, after another, after another... Sure, the early action sequences bristle, but there’s nary a break in the mayhem over the course of the 130- minute running time which means that by the second act you’re easily as exhausted as Wick looks throughout the film itself. In short: the seemingly non-stop barrage of bullets and fisticuffs soon escalates into a mind-numbing game of one-upmanship in the form of number of guns fired and asses kicked.
To add to the action-on-auto-pilot vibe we get tossed some serious miscasting (Angelica Huston as a Russian mob matriarch and Halle Barry as a former assassin-turned-Morocco hotel manager), a kind of groveling John Wick casually begging for foregiveness and his life at every turn, and the complete destruction of the mystique of the underworld created in the first two installments. The end result is a film that pales in comparison to either of the previous entries in the series.
This isn’t to say JW3 a complete waste of your time. The first act is visually kinetic, both in terms of choreography and cinematography; it’s teeming with slick imagery--NYC drenched in rain and neon-- plus some engaging and creatively gonzo fight sequences.
Things start to fall apart, however, once Wick leaves The Big Apple and journeys to the assassin mecca of Morocco. Once there, the inevitable ensuing gun fight is long, laborious, and filled with “magic bullets” (Barry’s character never once reloads her gun during the extended battle!). If that weren’t enough, Wick ends up wandering in the desert and is eventually granted an audience with the head of the High Table in a scene cribbed from Lawrence of Arabia; this segment of the film is obviously intended to be somewhat existential, but instead is rather hokey.
By the film’s end everything is on overkill, even down to the Enter The Dragon-by-way- of-The Lady From Shanghai-influenced final fight, which, while visually intriguing, ultimately feels lackluster and anticlimactic (not to mention just a tad too long). It’s all capped off with an ending that blatantly screams “John Wick 4 Coming Soon!” (the fourth chapter was recently greenlit, btw) as opposed to the more enigmatic endings of the two previous films.
All of this said, I have half a mind to go see it again just to make sure I didn’t miss anything lurking between the flying bullets and broken bodies.
Rating: 2.5/5
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