Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum
30-second review: The reason the unlikely John Wick franchise works is because it understands its audience and, more importantly, trusts them. John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum mercifully leaves the bloated plot of the second installment behind to deliver another lean action-thriller with enough forward momentum to give you the genre thrills you crave. And the action is stunning. It becomes a little too self-aware in its third act to stick the landing, but the journey there is definitely worth it.
Where to watch John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum: Available to buy or rent on Prime Video.
Tick tock. Full review below ?
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum is brilliant because it’s aware it’s the third film in a franchise. By this point in a lesser franchise, audiences are probably getting jaded and experiencing diminishing returns as they call the shots — in this case, headshots — the movie is going to make before it makes them. But John Wick is no normal franchise.
Instead of going for a trilogy capper or a callback-filled trip down memory lane, Parabellum is about John Wick (Keanu Reeves) being tired he’s in this movie. Who could blame him? The events of the three movies happen back to back, with this one picking up seconds after the last.
Wick is deemed “excommunicado” by the High Table — who control the sprawling underground infrastructure for the world of assassins — and placed under a $14 million dollar bounty. With just an hour to prepare himself, John makes an attempt to escape a city that has only one goal — to kill him.
The first act is a stunning, non-stop action scene that brilliantly cuts between Wick’s journey around the city that has a series of fights that will probably rank among the best of the decade. And despite three movies stuffed with fights, this movie finds a way to not repeat itself. Seriously, the first 30-minutes are spent with a weak and injured John fighting off foes off in increasingly creative ways.
He goes from the New York Public Library where we see him take down a 7-foot killer with a book to a knife-throwing fight in an antique shop to a stable where he strategically uses horses to take down a squad of assassins. On top of that, there’s a motorcycle chase on horseback.
Whereas the action in Chapter 2 leaned heavily on blood and gore, Parabellum makes the violence brutal, but oddly beautiful — something I appreciated about Atomic Blonde. Director Chad Stahelski knows how to stage action, in this movie, he learns how to capture it.
Take the act two capper that finds John in Casablanca with his old friend Sofia (Halle Berry) fighting off a trove of killers that seem to be coming out of nowhere — just like a video game. However, Stahelski makes the decision to shift the point-of-view of the scene to Sofia, which allows us to see some incredible and dynamic coordination between her and her two tactical attack dogs. I was breathless the entire time.
Of course, we dig further into the world and meet new characters like a shrewd ballet instructor (Anjelica Houston) who helps John get out of the city, an Adjudicator for the High Table (Asia Kate Dillon playing a revolutionary non-binary character) whose task is to bring down anyone who helped John escape with an assist from an assassin called Zero (Mark Dacascos). And thankfully, we spend more time in the Continental with Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick), who become even more instrumental to the story.
But most importantly, we spend time with a tired and rundown John who is now even more infamous than he once was. This fact influences a third act that feels more like a slapstick comedy than it does an action movie. It’s entertaining but distracting. Still, it’s a bold move considering this movie officially brings the franchise to the mainstream.
Parabellum doesn’t do much work to make you like it. Truthfully, if you made it this far in the franchise, there’s almost no way you don’t. They’ve laid the groundwork to take this story anywhere and you will follow because John Wick and the world he inhabits will never not be interesting. I thought I’d be jaded with the franchise, but keep them coming.
Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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