Mortal Sins: A Review of John Wick 3: Parabellum (Mild Spoilers)

directed by Chad Stahelski
written by Derek Kolstad, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams and Shay Hatten

Five years (in real time) after retired assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) came out of retirement to put some serious hurt on a bratty Russian mobster for killing his puppy and stealing his car, and two years (again, in real time) after he blew the brains out of a bratty Italian mobster for having John kill his sister, only to double-cross him, John Wick is on the run for his life. Having killed Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), a newly-instated member of the High Table, on the Continental, where killing is forbidden, John has basically marked himself for death, though Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of the Continental and an old friend, gives John a head start.

This movie, John Wick 3: Parabellum, starts moments after the last one ended, with Wick on the run and the minutes counting down until just about every assassin in the world descends on him. The High Table sends an Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) to ensure Wick's demise, and to punish those who aided him, including Winston for giving him a head start, and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) for giving him the gun and the bullets with which he killed Santino. Meanwhile, Wick pulls in just about every favor he can, including those owed him by Belarusian mobsters headed by the Director (Anjelica Huston), and a retired fellow killer named Sophia (Halle Berry), all to seek an audience with the one person who stands above the High Table, all for the sole purpose of staying alive so that he can continue to remember his dead wife. It'll be easier said than done, though as the Adjudicator then taps Zero (Mark Dacascos), a sushi-chef/killer par excellence flanked by an elite team of assassins.

Well, the good news is that anyone looking for nearly two hours of non-stop murder and mayhem is almost certain to be sated. Stahelski and company know only too well what made the first two movies box-office hits and have piled on the death-dealing quite generously here. One hardly walks into this movie expecting some deep reflection on the human condition; I know I didn't.

My problem with this movie, however, is actually something I started to feel watching the second film (which I still liked, all things considered) and it's that in giving us a smorgasbord of martial arts and gun battles, Stahelski and his crew have become repetitive. I have no pretensions or delusions about what this movie is about, but when a good chunk of running time consists of gun battles that follow a distinctly redundant depiction of judo flips and head shots, the initial thrill at the action gives rise, dare I say it, to boredom, arguably the one mortal sin for any action movie.

The movie still feels hard-hitting when Wick and his numerous opponents are getting down and dirty; Wick's first fight is with a seven-foot (!) assassin who tries to murder him in a public library, and Wick is forced to defend himself using, of all things, a library book, and it is followed in short order by another hand-to-hand fight in an antique store that involves knives and even an axe, and then by a chase scene in which Wick hides in a stable and has horses kick his would-be killers in the head. Later in the film, during a series of "boss battles" between Wick and Zero and his various disciples, the action soars.

Whenever Wick has a gun in his hand, though, it's basically video game mode, with Wick doing the same thing, over and over again, on two different continents. He's later joined by Halle Berry and two ferocious attack dogs when he visits Morocco, but really, apart from the dimly-lit exotic locale, the new setting doesn't really offer anything to differentiate the non-stop head shots made there from those made anywhere else in the film.

Also, unlike its predecessors, this film leans uncharacteristically on computer-generated imagery, and I'm not talking about the slick, seamless kind you see in billion-dollar blockbusters but the really bad, dime-store kind that made movies in the 00s really hard to watch. The first time John Wick has a horse kick a would-be killer it's okay, but the second time it's a sequence right out of Paul Blart: Mall Cop. I kid you not.

Perhaps the worst part of the film is that anyone who comes into the film hoping that this would wrap things up, as I did, will be sorely disappointed. If they insist on doing this again, I really, really hope they at least try to inject some variety in their gun battles.

6/10