John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum Film Review

An Adrenalin Ride While Sitting in Your Seat

Cast:
Keanu Reeves … John Wick
Halle Berry … Sofia
Ian McShane … Winston
Laurence Fishburne … Bowery King
Mark Dacascos … Zero
Asia Kate Dillon … The Adjudicator
Lance Reddick … Charon
Tobias Segal … Earl
Anjelica Huston … The Director
Robin Lord Taylor … Administrator
Susan Blommaert … Librarian
Jerome Flynn … Berrada

John Wick: Chapter 3 picks up immediately where John Wick 2 ended, with him and his dog running through the rain trying to escape his fate. So right away, you can honestly say that this unfolding does feel like you’re reading the next chapter in this story arc. You do get a sense of dread for the character played by Keanu Reeves as John Wick. You feel for him because he looks to be in pain while running down the street. You even get the sense of misery for the dog as he endures the downpour from the rain. We’re already invested in this man from the last time. It takes mere seconds to get an understanding of what he is going through. He’s isolated from everyone and the only true friend he has is his dog.

Tick Tock Mr. Wick said the homeless man as John takes a break from running while stopping to rest in an alleyway. But you know this isn’t just any homeless man preaching to John. As time ticks down before the $14 million dollar contract are released on John, he must get to the library to secure his tokens so as to improve his living arrangements against the powerful underworld. Once at the library, we see Susan Blommaert aka Mr. Kaplan from The Blacklist, as the librarian. Her familiar face is steady and calm as she assists John in what is more of a storage facility for people who want to stay off the grid. He retrieves his precious belongings but before he gets out of there, he is confronted by an early adversary who wants to jump the gun on the John Wick bounty. The much larger opponent battles John as John fights back with a book. I must say that it was surprising how John turned that book into a weapon in such magnificent and diabolical ways. Who knew a book could be used as a deadly weapon? In the hands of John Wick, that’s who.

The fight leaves him injured and as time clicks down, he heads to a fixer who rushes to stitch up the wound. He does as best as he can before time runs out and that is where John takes over and completes the task. The fixer knows that there will be retribution for helping John Wick, even just for giving him medicine so he prepares himself a get out of jail solution. With the level of seriousness you are watching, you wouldn’t expect too many moments of humor but in this scene, you get in unexpectedly twice and it’s worth the wait. You get it from perfect timing from Keanu’s deadpan style of what he did in this scene but I won’t spoil it for you.

In the first fifteen minutes, we see more action and punishment to John that’s on a level that even Avengers Endgame couldn’t muster. While Avengers Endgame had this penultimate battle scene at the end of the film, John Wick has several battle scenes that it truly does become a roller coaster of sequences that you wonder about the physical toll it’s starting to take on John Wick? I must say that there are some scary looking henchmen who are exceptional. Kudos for finding them whom I am assuming some are stuntmen. They definitely are earning their pay with this film. I know it’s CGI SFX but there is a fight sequence involving a horse that I can relate to. I’ve been around horses a lot and experienced being kicked by one and it’s scary. Watching a bad guy gets kicked in the head by these powerful animals gave me a little PTSD. At this stage of the game, John has yet to pick up a gun and he’s using a book and a horse to fend off the bounty hunters.

There is a cab scene where John and his dog are in the back of a cab trying to get to his destination. I looked at the shot as the camera panned up from the rear of the cab and looked down the road to a traffic jam. This shot looked like a Japanese anime by the way the lights hit the line of cars down the road. For a second, it looked like the anime, Ghost in The Shell. And in another exterior night scene, there was this hint of a homage to the original Bladerunner. I give a tip of the hat to the cinematography for doing an excellent job.

For those who are SJW’s, there are three good roles played by women who aren’t condescending or have identity politics on their agenda. Anjelica Houston as The Director, Asia Kate Dillon as the Adjudicator, and Halle Berry as Sophia is straight up prime beef. Nobody is using their gender as an object that needs to be used as a battering ram or as a cliché where it has become the usual hackneyed and derivative trope.

The Director is scary. She doesn’t do fool at all. As she directs a troupe of young ballerinas, they tremble in fear by her very whisper. The Adjudicator comes in to lay down the law for those who violated the agreement for helping John Wick. The Director doesn’t budge one inch as she accepts her punishment. I don’t think we have seen the last of the Director should there be a Chapter 4.

Sophia, on the other hand, is concrete tough, not steel tough but concrete tough. John comes to her to get to his next journey and we discover that they share a past. John pulls out this amulet that has here bloody fingerprint in it that signifies a blood oath was given. She is obligated. They go to s man named Berrada who’s only payment is one of Sophia’s dogs. She tells him no and he shoots the dog. Luckily, the dog is wearing a bulletproof vest and now all hell breaks loose. We get to see this symphony of gun violence and death unfold. The pair of dogs are in on the kills as well. Suffix it to say, Sophia and John are some serious dog lovers. This would be a whole different movie it John and Sophia were cat lovers. Between the dogs and the horse, the horse has two kills under his belt while the dogs have at least eleven to fourteen between them. These dogs were highly trained and exceptionally good. Sophia and John achieve victory in this dust-up and later John takes the amulet and presses his bloody thumbprint into the amulet and hands it to Sophia. This signals to the audience that yes, there will be a Chapter 4 in the offering and I bet it will be rescuing Sophia’s daughter.

John moves on to his next destination where he meets The Elder who, in order for John to live out his life, orders John to kill his friend, Winston. Back in New York, The Adjudicator is still punishing those who assisted John. She goes to Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King to punish him which he balks at but in the end, with the death of some of his crew, he accepts the inevitable. She then decommissions Winston’s hotel which makes it persona non grata with the people in charge. We then see in a cameo, Robin Lord Taylor aka Penguin from Gotham, as the Administrator decommissioning the hotel with his rubber stamp. John makes it back to the hotel and Winston knows he was tasked to kill him but John ignores that directive.

With Lance Reddick’s Charon by his side, John battle body armored men in this latest passage of death. Mark Dacascos’ Zero and his men are also battling against John. In one other humoresque scene, Zero fanboys out over having to finally meet John Wick. Charon and John prevail over the henchmen and the Adjudicator now wants a parlay to rectify the situation. It’s resolved in a brutal way suffices it to say that you wonder if it was a ruse or was it intentional justification? The Bowery King still lives even though he was cut seven times and John Wick lives even though he fell off a balcony and you can definitely see Chapter 4 will soon come.

Ratings: A