John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)
Do you want to see John Wick (Keanu Reeves) kill someone with a book? A horse? A motorcycle helmet? His own belt? A bag of Skittles? An armor-plated attack dog?
Am I making any of those up? You’ll just have to go see it to find out!
Picking up mere minutes after “John Wick: Chapter 2” (2017) ended, “John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum” (2019) is the ultimate videogame movie.
I’m fully aware that it’s not based on any one videogame, but it’s the cinematic embodiment of every single-player first-person-shooter game on the market.
As the third movie in the franchise, the production team has absolutely hit their stride. This is a movie that knew exactly how ridiculous it wanted to be, and did so without the slightest hint of self-doubt, striding through the shenanigans with poise and confidence. It managed to take its own premise seriously enough to get you to buy in without being so uptight as to make it not fun.
The absolute coolest part of this movie were the extended fight scenes. Any action movie can use quick-cuts to fill out a fight, with each camera shot lasting maybe a second - just long enough to show a character take one action - but JW3 used 30 second cuts, showing spectacularly choreographed combatives with both fists and weapons.
I can only imagine the amount of time that the actors and stunt people must have spent practicing to get so many scenes right.
I don’t believe it to be a controversial statement to say that Keanu Reeves is not a great actor. His speaking is stunted and he doesn’t have a particularly wide spread of emotions or expressions.
However, the director used that weakness as a story-telling strength, giving Wick a chance to pull off some very well-timed humor, dropping just the right word at just the right time, repeatedly.
Co-Star Ian McShane brought plenty of gravitas in his return to the role of Winston, and Lance Reddick continued to be the ultimate hotel concierge. Some of the best shots were wordless, simply relying on Winston’s reaction to make the scene.
Through the three movies, the series has developed some intriguing world-building, showing us a secret underground world where literally everyone seems to be a member of this global assassin conglomerate, and not a single government seems to care.
Truly, it’s a stupid premise.
But again: the movie tells its story with such unwavering confidence that you can’t help but simply nod and play along.
The story hops around the world as Wick travels to kill new people in exotic places. At no point did they ever show title cards or text to identify where the scene was. The scripts and context clues quickly explained away those details, but simply not stating the location is a pleasant silver-screen rarity.
The best story-telling concept is how closely these movies follow their own internal consistency. So far, each flick has taken the concepts and ideas from the previous one, built on them, developed further, and avoided any kind of retconning for ideas that no longer make sense. This is great, and more series need to follow that methodology.
The soundtrack was hit-or-miss, but one particular gunfight was scored by an excellent choice of classical music, shown to be played on a turntable, no less.
The effects were outstanding. There might have been minor green-screen or CGI something needed to be ‘bigger than life’ (or prohibitively expensive) to film, but if there was, I was never able to identify it.
By and large, all the action scenes appeared to be practical effects - flawlessly executed by and excellently displayed.
The set pieces and scenery were gorgeous, with some great wide-angle shots for settings, or focus on cool buildings with interesting architecture.
Now, I’ve seen a great many ‘shoot-em-up-Tony’ flicks of varying degrees of violence and gore.
This was, by magnitudes, the best one I’ve seen in this category.
I had to think really hard about how to rate this.
Ultimately, I decided on 5 Claws, not because it’s a good movie that I want to watch over and over again, or because it tells some sort of moral tale, or a cultural truth to be followed, but because of the production values and cinematography. They were spectacular, and for that alone, you should see it.
I got to see it in a regular theater, but I would have loved to see it in IMAX.
