Warning: The following review contains details about the film that support my opinions, this means that a SPOILER ALERT is now in effect. If you wish to see the film with an open mind, I suggest you click away now…
HOLY SHIT! Is currently the best way to describe how I feel about the new John Wick film… I’d call it intense, but I think chaotic would be more of an apt description.
I enjoyed the movie. It was well made, made sense and was EXTREMELY violent, three characteristics which generally make a good film in my opinion. But this isn’t just any film, this is a John Wick film.
Although still especially violent, each kill in the first and second instalment felt like they had a purpose. In the third movie however, there was a number of scenes that felt like they were violent for the sake of being violent. As well as this, the few fight scenes that managed to last longer than a few minutes felt a little too long. John consistently made quick work of his opponents in the first and second movies, so to see him struggle against any one opponent is a foreign concept.
What saved the day for the movie and might warrant seeing for a second time was the time the spent adding to and improving the characters we already know. Although there was a fair amount we didn’t know about a number of the characters, what we did know made complete sense. So taking the time to fill in the gaps was a far better choice in my opinion than making a movie that wouldn’t require a sequel.
We already knew about the High Table. They’re mentioned on a few occasions throughout the first and second movies as way to keep John in line whenever he considered doing something against the rules. We met two members of the High Table in the second film when Santino D’Antonio used John’s marker, ordering him to kill his sister Gianna in order to claim their family’s seat at the table. In Chapter 3 however, we meet our first High Table member on official business in form of the Adjudicator. Right from the get go, the Adjudicator shows us how much influence she and the High Table have, immediately asserting dominance over our favourite characters and characters we’re meeting for the first time.
Much like the High Table, we obviously know John already. He is the main protagonist after all. All we really know though is how good he is at his job and how little we’d want to be the one he’s hunting. After all, he once killed 3 people in bar with a pencil. In chapter 3 we get to pull back the curtain and learn a little bit about John’s life before the movies. As we learned of John’s ties to the Ruska Roma Ethnic group, we too learned his true name and heritage, got a small insight into some of his training and we learned were he got some of his rather epic tattoos from. On top of this, we also learned he was in possession of someone else’s marker. The very object that set the events of the second movie into motion.
What REALLY made me enjoy the movie however was characters such as Winston, Charon (the desk manager) and the Bowery King being more than secondary characters. Winston and Charon were in a fair amount of the first and second movies, but to me they felt as if they were only really there to make John’s story line more interesting. I knew Winston was a bit of a bad ass, but to see Charon take up arms to help defend the Continental was something I wasn’t at all expecting. Unfortunately, due to the nature of his story line, the Bowery King was in the third movie about as much (maybe even less) as he was in the second movie. The little time he did have however was certainly not wasted as he produced two of the greatest one liners I have EVER heard.
Would I recommend this movie to others? If you don’t mind a bit of violence then yes, I would definitely recommend you go see it. You’d have to watch the first 2 movies before you do to get the full back story, but it’s not the worst way to spend 2 hours.
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The Book and Movie 