Bigger Than Ever: A Review of John Wick 4

 directed by Chad Stahelski

written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch

The action saga that kicked off in 2014 when a retired hitman avenged his the killing of his dog and the theft of his car by murdering an entire Russian crime family has returned with easily its biggest installment yet. 

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still on the run, having been marked for death by the High Table of assassins over two films ago, but this time he's decided to take the fight to the High Table with the intent of killing them all, with the help of his allies, the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), Winston (Ian McShane) the manager of the New York Continental Hotel, and Charon (the late  Lance Reddick), the concierge of the Continental.  The High Table isn't messing around, though; they've tasked a powerful new player, the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgaard) to oversee Wick's elimination. Gramont is a canny player, and to get the job done he Caine (Donnie Yen), an old ally of Wick who also happens to owe the High Table big.  Of course, he also summons a huge army of lethal killers with guns and body armor to the do job, too. No place is safe now, not even the Continental hotel in Japan which is run by Wick's old friend Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama).  Another wildcard in the mix it the mysterious, nameless tracker (Shamier Anderson) a freelance bounty hunter who seeks to drive the bounty for Wick up as high as it can go before killing him.  In short, it all appears to be coming to a head.

Full disclosure: I didn't like John Wick 3: Parabellum, because in my opinion the fight sequences got repetitive after a while. There was every danger of that happening here, especially given the film's nearly three-hour running time, but I persisted because I have followed this franchise pretty faithfully since I saw the first one on DVD years ago.  

I'm happy to report however, that with the exception of the film's first big battle in the Japanese branch of the hotel Continental, which featured a lot of the jiu-jitsu-and-headshot choreography that had been a staple of the first three films, this film really takes its fight sequences to a whole new level, managing to devote generous screen time to every single one of the high=profile action stars it has added to the John Wick family, whether it's Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada or Scott Adkins who puts on a fat suit, and gold-plated dentures to play German hitman Killa.  Yen features most prominently here and nearly steals the show from Reeves with his killer moves and quippy humor, but make no mistake, this is still John Wick's movie, and Reeves is absolutely firing on all cylinders here to bring us the most extreme stunts we could possibly get without Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise showing up. Heck, I'd say Reeves is on par with them after this film.   

Director Chad Stahelski seriously switches things up here, and not just in terms of fight choreography and blocking. The guy has an extraordinary eye for beauty, which he effectively juxtaposes against the extreme violence, and with the story taking John and his pursuers all over the world, from Morocco to Japan to Germany and finally to France, he has ample opportunity to give the audience some real money shots, and boy, oh boy does he deliver. This bodes extremely well for the adaptation of the wildly popular video game Ghost of Tsushima that Stahelski is currently slated to direct. 

Do I have any problems with this movie? Well, as I said, it is rather long, though the time taken to set up the action is pretty well-spent. I had issues with the first major battle sequence, but just about everything after that played out excellently. 

At at a time when it's hard to find movies that feel fresh and exciting in view of the endless onslaught of franchises, it's refreshing that at least one of them manages to get it right. 

8.5/10

10 Thoughts on the Oscars

 So another year of Academy Awards has come and gone (a week ago, as of writing), and at the very outset I'd like to state that in my humble opinion, all of the winners deserved what they got. I found it to be a very satisfying ceremony with heartfelt speeches and lots of feel-good moments, and, just as notably, none of the moments of eye-roll inducing stupidity that left a stain on ceremonies of the last few years like the 2017 "envelope mix-up" or the idiocy of having the Best Leading Actor Oscar announced last in 2021.  

I think everything I have to say about the 2023 Oscars can be distilled in ten points:

1.  I'm just glad to have watched it live for the first time in ages. As early as 2019, there was some strange issue with the channels available to me on cable and for whatever reason a live broadcast just wasn't in the cards. That was a shame because that was Marvel Studios' banner year, with the first Black Panther movie garnering six Oscar nominations, including the history-making Best Picture nomination. From 2020 to 2022, I no longer had cable television so I had to content myself with live updates on websites. It was nice to finally be able to watch the ceremony in real time again. Thank you, Disney+

2.   I LOVE that this was the year of the "has-beens." After the 2022 Oscars, in which Best Leading Actor winner Will Smith showed himself to be the embodiment of privilege by publicly assaulting Oscar host Chris Rock, it was such a welcome change to see actors whom time and circumstance have humbled reaping rewards that they richly deserved. I haven't seen Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, but I have read all about Brendan Fraser's journey in making it, and as a fan of Brendan Fraser all the way back to his Mummy days I was really delighted to see him pick up the Oscar for Best Leading Actor. I was even happier for Ke Huy Quan whom I had only ever seen as a child actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, who had been away from acting for much longer than Fraser ever had. His comeback, even without the Oscar, would have been the feel-good story of the year, but now it's simply perfection, and he couldn't have had a better vehicle than the sensational film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (which I HAVE seen...and loved). Speaking of which... 

3.   It was so nice to have a horse in the race again. The last time I could really and wholeheartedly say that was in 2013 when I was rooting for Argo to win (which it did). I mean, I've enjoyed films like Parasite, 1917, BlackkKlansman and, Black Panther among other Oscar Best Picture winners and hopefuls, but Argo was a good, old-fashioned thriller which, for all of its foibles, had loads of charm and told its story very well.  Even though Everything, Everywhere All at Once is a completely different kind of film from Argo, I loved it just the same for almost the same reason: it told its story masterfully, in a way that both charmed me and connected with me. I also cheered for the Telugu language, global sensation RRR when its Oscar-nominated song, "Naatu Naatu" took home the gold.  It feels really good to have an actual emotional connection to the movies that win. That said...

4.  Here's a statistic I find unsettling: the widely despised 2016 DC superhero film Suicide Squad has more Oscars than the 2023 Best Picture nominees Elvis, Tar, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, and Triangle of Sadness COMBINED.   I'd argue that this was an inevitable consequence of expanding the field of Best Picture nominees from 5 pictures back in 2009. Between them, Everything, Everywhere All at Once  and All Quiet on the Western Front, won 11 Oscars, so there was barely anything else left to win.  A whopping 50% of the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar went home empty-handed.  I know that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, but I still can't help but feel for the people who poured their heart and soul into those movies.  

5. I loved seeing all the fresh faces. I loved that among so many of the major nominations, from directing to about all of the acting nominations, there were many first time nominees, or people who had rarely been nominated before. About the only familiar face among the nominees was two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, who ultimately lost to Michelle Yeoh.  This is the kind of freshness that, in my humble opinion, will help keep the Oscars relevant in the years to come so long may it continue. On that point...

6.  Diversity is not the poison pill that narrow-minded people insist that it is.  One would be hard-pressed, for example to find anyone who was unhappy when "Naatu Naatu" won the Oscar for Best Original Song. "Diversity" meant that for the first time in 95 years, a song from an Indian movie could win an Oscar, because it forced Academy voters to step out of their comfort zones and look at other movies. It also meant that performances like Michelle Yeoh's and Ke Huy Quan's performances in what is effectively a "genre film" like EEAAO, which would have had Oscar voters turning their noses up not that long ago, could win big.  

7.  No high-and-mighty speeches from winners is a really good thing. There's not much more to add, lest I become guilty of making a speech myself. 

8. Hollywood's love affair with itself was tempered this year. Steven Spielberg's film, The Fabelmans was an early favorite and it kind of fit the mold of films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Artist and Argo which basically celebrated Hollywood and won one award or another. The shut-out of The Fabelmans from even a single award, to me at least, says that Hollywood is ready to stop fellating itself, at least for now.  

9.  As highlighted by Guillermo del Toro in his acceptance speech for Pinocchio, animation remains in a ghetto just outside "cinema" and that's just wrong. 

Finally...

10.  Though All Quiet on the Western Front would have been a deserving Best Picture winner, I am very grateful that the Oscar for Best Picture went to a movie that spent several months exclusively in movie theaters. Everything, Everywhere All at Once has once again proved that the best place to appreciate cinema is still in movie theaters.

John Wick Meets Mr. Incredible: A Review of Nobody

 directed by Ilya Naishuller

written by Derek Kolstad

This is a movie we never got in theaters here in the Philippines; at the time of its global release, March 2021, we were still under strict lockdown. I'm grateful, then, that nearly two years after it came out in theaters, we finally got it on Netflix. 

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is living the American dream; he has a nice house in suburbia, he's married to a successful realtor (Connie Nielsen) with whom he has two lovely children (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath), and he has a stable (if boring) job as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's factory. One night, his home is broken into by two desperate burglars, whom Hutch actually lets go, but when he discovers his daughter's toy missing, something inside him is set off and a part of him that he has long kept hidden comes exploding to the surface. He tracks the burglars down, but when he learns their true circumstances, he knows he cannot take his revenge on them.  On the bus ride home, a Russian mobster and his mates hop on the bus and start harassing people, and all hell breaks loose, in more ways than one.  To help him out of the mess he finds himself in, Hutch may need help from his brother Harry (RZA) and his dad David (Christopher Lloyd).

As I wrote in the title, this movie, written by John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad, essentially takes the premise of the Keanu Reeves-led film about an assassin who comes out of retirement because some Russian mobster kills the dog his late wife gave him and tweaks it a bit to make the assassin a bored suburban dad yearning for the days when he was kicking ass and taking names. Kolstad basically turns John Wick into Bob Parr aka Mr. Incredible, only instead of superhuman strength he has an assassin's consummate skill. Instead of a Russian killing a puppy, the film has a Russian thug and his gang harass a bus full of passengers.  Instead of John Wick coming reluctantly out of retirement to right a wrong, Hutch basically yearns to beat the crap out of people (who deserve it) and basically jumps on the first pretext to do so.  

The action is realized with the brutality and effective choreography of a John Wick movie, and it's all the more effective because of how convincingly Odenkirk plays the mild-mannered facade that Hutch has adopted to hide the killer lurking underneath.  There's a real sense of contrast here.  There's also some judiciously-used humor, and anyone sick of the quip-laden Marvel movies can relax; there aren't that many of them here. Still, for all of these trapping the movie can't quite shake the fact that it's a John Wick facsimile at heart. 

Fortunately, Odenkirk's performance is honestly what keeps this movie from feeling like an inferior John Wick clone, but the similarities really are a bit too glaring to ignore. Would I see another one? Maybe.

6.5/10