John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Jun 14

A fitting end to Keanu Reeve's John Wick.

Presentation:

The DP explains the choice of shooting large format, citing that they knew from the beginning they wanted push looks and lowlight performance. The large format allows more to fit in the frame to give Keanu more room, but i think this was a poor choice as Keanu is approaching 60 and is considerably slower than previous films. Super 35 would have cropped in and made the scenes more focused and have bigger punch. Side characters are less charismatic than before the villains are also kinda weaksauce. The film does look stylized, albeit a bit over saturated for my taste. It's a bit too garish at times, this isn't supposed to look like bladerunner, but it does look good. The film uses some of my favorite anamorphics the ALFA, but not entirely. There is an immaculate top down scene that is just pure fun.

Story:

There are a few problems with this one, I don't understand why they didn't implement the house barter from the get go if it could get Wick out of this pickle. If it could work this time, it should have worked in John Wick 3. I don't understand why they made Donnie Yen blind again, his character was fun but represented too cool than he actually was. Bill Skarsgard succeeds in playing a douchebag villain, but lacks nuance and is a bit too cliche. Also the fat guy's costume wasn't executed well. They try to implement longer scenes with the implementation of bulletproof suit mechanics, but it really takes away from the visceral kills imo. I also felt action scenes were running out of novelty, a biproduct of constantly having to go bigger and bigger. But you do have some really great scenes like the symbolic staircase to give audiences a rewarding experience.