- John Wick: Chapter 3 the promise of John Wick: Chapter 3 is in superposition. John Wick: Chapter 3 Depending on how one comes into John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, from which angle, that promise is simultaneously fulfilled and squandered. Chad Stahelski’s third and by no means last entry in the saga of laconic gentleman terminator John Wick (Keanu Reeves), the Baba Yaga of every gangster’s worst nightmares, either lives up to previous entries as far as setting the standard for visceral, eardrum-squelching violence, or it fails to take the series in the direction presaged by the apocalyptic cliffhanger of the previous chapter. No, every living human in New York is not a secret assassin, plunging John Wick into a race against time through a Dantean Hell of his own devising—like Crank but better (sorry, Vulgar Auteurism aficionados)—but John Wick does pretty much murder everybody in the City before traveling to Morocco, where he murders even more people, before returning to New York, where he continues decimating the urban center’s population. As Continental Manager Winston (Ian McShane) puts it, John Wick needs to decide whether he’s the boogie man or, simply, a man. Whether John Wick is a videogame or something more existential. He chooses both. We’re afraid to lift the top off Schrodinger’s box to see whether that dog is alive or dead.
Parabellum begins, as one might expect, where Chapter 2 ends, John Wick given an hour grace period to get out of New York City before his “excommunicado” leaves him without an ally on earth and a $14M bounty on his slickly hirsute head. As he runs, injured, through the streets with his new dog by his side, it begins to rain buckets; soaked and bathed in neon light, this is Hot Topic noir, bleakness and despair wreathed in endless emo cool. Enter the Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), a vestige of the High Table, the governing body apparently in charge of…everything? After John killed a recently matriculated member of the High Table on Continental grounds (see: Chapter 2), the Adjudicator’s dispatched to figure out why that happened, who’s to blame and, more importantly, who aided John Wick during that ill-advised grace period, which he should have never gotten in the first place. Delivering grim sentences to both Winston and the the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) for their abetting of John Wick after he broke the rules, the Adjudicator establishes a clear hierarchy of power within the Wickiverse, a structure only complicated when later John attempts to contact the Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui), who is somehow above the High Table. By the time we reach the final action spectacle, during which the forces aligned against John Wick wear the kind of body armor requiring an exorbitant amount of kill shots and then, halfway through the melee, a weapon upgrade, we’ve lapsed completely into the realm of the first-person shooter, realizing we’ve already made our way through numerous, ever-increasingly difficult levels and boss battles with an impeccable kill/death ratio.
The limitless beauty of the John Wick franchise, crystalized in Chapter 3, is that alluding to videogames when talking about the movie doesn’t matter. None of this matters. At one point, John runs from the countless bands of thugs after him—each dressed thematically, as if New York is divided amongst The Warriors-esque assassin cliques—leading (in this case) a group of vaguely English dandies into a horse barn, where, upon activating his environment, has two different horses kick two different men to death, their skulls collapsing like deflated souffles. It’s shocking and one can feel that brutality all the way down to the pit of one’s stomach, but it’s also undeniably the stuff of videogames, of a Streets of Rage kind of relentless brawler. Even John Wick’s near-immortality reads as a bountiful stock of 1-ups; when, early in the film, John rushes to an underground doctor’s (Randall Duk Kim) office to take care of the stab wound he’d just received, the doctor comments that the knife “nicked an artery,” a wound that would have left any normal player dead, bled out in the street. In retrospect, any modern cinematic action hero faces similarly physically insurmountable odds and somehow survives, but as videogames and action movies parabolically draw closer and closer to one another, John Wick 3 may be the first of its kind to figure out how to keep that comparison from being a point of shame.