Fran Magazine: Issue #55

The John Wick: Chapter 4 issue

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In the final act of the second John Wick movie — John Wick 2 — John Wick and an assassin named Cassian played by Common fight on the NYC “subway,” which is, to any enterprising New Jersey transit user, actually a PATH train, the connecting service between Jersey City and Hoboken to lower Manhattan. Refresh your memory.

I rode this train every day for two years, more or less, so I think I know when I see it on a big movie screen. There is a brief sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 in which John and a young assassin played by pop star Rina Sawayama get on a train in Osaka. Close: this is also a PATH train connecting New Jersey and New York, designed with subway advertisements and CGI to simulate that the two are in Japan. If pressed, I am 99% positive that the station is Journal Square, my old stomping grounds. I could be wrong; I’m just Fran Magazine.

We like to see ourselves reflected on screen, even when something is not “relatable,” though I think much of the John Wick thing is meant to be relatable: the relentless march of grief, the tedium of the workplace, the inane bureaucracy injected into every day living. Don’t get me wrong, I also think the John Wick movies are stupid, because they are about guys with guns running around shooting each other over grievances big and small, and death is rendered all but headshot (or sometimes, for effect, headshot+), but the Wick films are a kind of stupid that gestures at smart, sort of like when someone starts doing platitudes on Twitter as though they have just discovered the sensation of personhood.

Vikram Murthi @fauxbeatpoet

I went into this fourth John Wick installment with eager trepidation: I more or less loathed the third entry in the franchise, which I found overstuffed, over-serious, and over-violent. “Over-violent?” an idiot is writing to me, “Haven’t you seen a movie before?” Yes, certainly, but to me the grand appeal of violence in the John Wick movies has been the craft of set pieces surrounding violence rather than the nature of the kills themselves. Keep in mind this is a movie about someone who hates their job. When the Wick franchise is operating at its best, the kill sequences feel almost musical — they are musical, honestly — and at worst, it’s like a Youtube compilation called “BEST JOHN WICK KILLS 240px” that someone has scored with the worst music imaginable.

I have also become increasingly averse towards excessive violence in film, which is obviously both a systemic societal problem and also a me problem. It is a great running joke within the franchise that a lot of the mass public violence is hardly blinked at be it by commuting New Yorkers or Berlin clubgoers or whatever. When I started watching more violent, frightening films as a part of my ongoing “brave era,” it really became a lesson in what exactly I was afraid of bearing witness to. Some two plus years into this era of my life where I’ll more or less agree to watch a movie with a guy with a chainsaw, I am far more perturbed by relentless gun violence than I am a spooky guy with a bad vibe (not that I prefer one over the other, ultimately). The former is always reminiscent of street construction or rain — unavoidable, loud, all-encompassing. I may have picked the wrong franchise to go long about.

At nearly three hours, John Wick: Chapter 4 is asking a lot of its viewer and providing, well, significantly less: on one hand, there is Scott Adkins as “Killa” and on the other hand, there is a staid reference to The Warriors that encompasses the entire third act. I found myself often distracted — by Ian McShane’s new teeth, by the shoddy CGI, by trying to figure out if that was Natalia Tena or what (it was). These are video games in movie form. I remember people complaining about “lack of motivation” in The Northman — another video game movie — not understanding that “motivation” has become synonymous with “accepting the quest.” Don’t think too hard about it, just press A or X or whatever. In the third John Wick, I kept wishing for the violence to end. In the fourth John Wick, I wish I could have skipped the cut scenes, smashing the controller every time they all started talking to each other.

The talking kills these movies, not only because it has begun to feel obvious how over it Keanu Reeves is, but because these are not movies about language in a meaningful sense. They could be saying anything to each other as long as every scene ends with them taking their guns out. To some degree, I think the movie knows this. Bill Skarsgard simpering, lovingly (?) francophobic portrayal of the Marquis of Whatever, donned in sequinned suits, embodies what I would call “blogger mindset,” recapper personality, whatever, in which he is constantly commenting on the action while also perpetuating it without ever taking part. He is trying to make reason of nonsense, only to make everything more nonsense. Wick, on the other hand, near-wordlessly glides through every obstacle to untangle the bureaucracy once again ruining his life. I think the movie knows this dichotomy to be funny, and my own overwrought thinking about it only plays into the “it’s action, stupid.” To that end, the Skarsgard performance is an awful that teeters on great. Does he have the juice? Maybe. Maybe we just need to keep putting those guys in video game movies to see what works.¹

When the sunrise is beautiful in a John Wick movie, it is beautiful in the way that it is in a video game, gesturing at something in my memory but not necessarily presenting anything better. That’s fine. I can make piece with a symbol. I feel similarly about the emotional arc, John’s continued tether to his deceased wife, for whom all of this is happening, probably, a ghost and an angel repeatedly saving him from himself. I thought of the month I played God of War. Bobby said something like, “it looks good but there only so many ways to behead a guy.” I thought this often during John Wick: Chapter 4. I am willing to go with just about any stakes presented to me about a tortured guy making it work for him, but don’t oversell me on it. I already paid for the ticket!

Donnie Yen — who is great — is the film’s saving grace, a rival assassin named Caine who is tasked by Skargard’s Marquis to go after Wick. Bad news: like every assassin with a name in this franchise, he and Wick go way back, and they more or less like each other, AND they more or less have experienced parallel loss. Whereas Reeves’s performance is weighted and anchored by a phony pathos, Yen knows this is a musical, going full Astaire or Kelly, basically lending a tone of silliness that Mark Dacascos brought to the third Wick movie. Dacascos, too, brought a degree of joy, as does the aforementioned Scott Adkins, a DTV martial arts guy I only know because I have a boyfriend but have grown to respect as though he is a member of my family. I am loathe to summon “fat suit discourse,” but I do think Adkins’s “Killa” is more in line with Fat Bastard from Austin Powers than he is in conversation with, like, The Whale, all of which is to say that it’s totally fine to have a guy in a bunch of prosthetics if it looks like he’s having a really great time with it.

Harris wrote on Letterboxd that the movie is about unions. I agree, though I also think this is where the franchise has run into issues in its later entries. Having all but ignored the emotional triggers of the franchise (there is constant lip service to Wick outside of work, but we don’t know this to be true), we only know Wick as employee, and we only know all the other assassins and phone girls and hotel managers as employees. The villains have turned out to be managers, freelance editors, people who need little jobs done who don’t care about timely payment or healthcare who are like “‘give me a few more days to find that out for you” and then never reply. Obviously this strikes a chord for me — famously unemployed — but also because this, too, is a video game trope at this point. One of the reasons I have profound affection for Witcher 3 as a “gaming experience” (kill me) is because Geralt of Rivia is the king of freelancers, a burdened and exhausted gig worker who is just trying to do right by his loved ones. Wick, too, shares this exhaustion, but each film has only made it more and more explicit that the villain is the boss and the allies are the other guys who also do your job. The other assassins may be trying to constantly kill Wick, but they know that his existence also buoys theirs. To that end, there is little place for the “villain” of these films to go. It will always be a loser, preening higher up with money to burn, and the guys they hire to kill John Wick will always be cool. Perhaps this is why the first one resonates so fully — not only because the emotional arc is clearest, but because the villains are just some guys. The scope is too grand to return to “just some guys,” but we also will never believe a boss or a rich guy or the High Table (fuck off!!) will be a viable threat in an emotional sense. Just a financial one.

1. I would also argue that Barbarian is a video game movie.