‘Not even you can kill everyone,’ Hiroyuki Sanada tells his old friend John Wick (Keanu Reeves).
Challenge accepted. Because even by John Wick’s own, extreme standards, the body count is off the scale, in this fourth and, seemingly, final instalment of the loony toony, shoot-em-up franchise that takes fight action to a whole new level.
We find our black-suited assassin, John Wick, on the run from The High Table – a super-elite authority that brokers kill and bounty contracts and can order its members to assassinate each other.
Its new sort-of boss is the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), an effete, cake-eating Euro-baddie who dispatches a blind samurai (a film-stealing Donnie Yen) to eradicate Wick. Easier said than done.
Plot is more akin to a video game wherein John Wick has to defeat ever-multiplying hoards of baddies in a staggering series of guns’n’ammo’n’arrows’n’anything-else-to-hand (knives, nun-chucks, playing cards, pencils etc) action set-pieces in order to complete one level and move on to the next.
And, whilst there are Easter eggs for fans, this is not a blockbuster sequel hampered by backstory. Indeed, clarity of purpose is one of its many strengths.
You’d never guess both Yen and Reeves are now pushing 60 – both have the balletic agility of Olympic gymnasts.
Elsewhere, a strong ensemble cast of both returning characters (Ian MacShane, Laurence Fishburne and, in one of his final roles, ) and newbies (Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama) each get their chance to utter gnomic statements like ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’, mainly in order for us all to catch our breath and check out the eye-ball-blowing scenery.
Wick’s distinctive, neon-drenched aesthetic has never looked more stunning.
Holding it all together, by . His dialogue may often be reduced to a single word – but no one can say ‘yeah’ like Reeves. His soulful presence haunts every frame, like a melancholy tree. And it’s Reeves who imbues his otherwise hilariously indestructible hero with vulnerability.
Indeed, given Wick has proved more bulletproof than his Kevlar suit (seriously, what do they load these guns with – popcorn??!), the uphill challenge for the film-makers is how to keep us invested in the potential peril.
The answer is in finding, literally, new angles on the action that combine breath-taking fight choreography with brilliantly sustained tension.
Did this really need to be 2hrs 49min long? No, but it would be a travesty to cut it.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is out in UK cinemas March 24.
