#25 — John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum
This is part of an ongoing, illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action movies. Last week I talked about a big action cartoon where the bad guys invent a special airline for convicts, but they don’t realize they’ve booked a one-way flight to Justice Town (the movie is Con Air).
Had to think a bit about this one. A very recent release — and also one defined by, and fairly criticized for excess. This is the big cheesecake of the franchise, the criminally rich, sugary, probably too-sweet-for-its-own-good sequel constantly trying to top itself. You can feel the franchise slowly becoming more disconnected with reality, but never with the physical nature of action filmmaking. It’s superhero myth-making, with an emphasis on stunt-work.
After a lot of internal debate, I came to the conclusion that I love this movie. Maybe not even in spite of its warts, but because of them. There’s a comfortable embrace of everything silly about its world. Characters interact through deliberate formalities while rules are explained almost for the sole purpose of being broken. Wick travels across the desert for guidance, and receives a hot bath and a freshly pressed suit of armor. Ninjas fight in a house made of glass. Animals are trained in the art of war. The film, in spite of an MCU-esque flirtation with levity, balances the tone quite nicely.
Like it or not, there’s a John Wick house style that’s been firmly established at this point. The colorful character names and lighting, the gold coins and mythology, and lots of gun-fu. I could do without the neon subtitles that occasionally pop up, but you can’t have everything. I appreciate that they created all this from scratch. They built their own house, and chapter 3 is the big party.
This entry features the most technically impressive and highest volume of action so far. The excess is felt in some of those lengthy stretches of violence. But within the repetition, I begin to notice things. The Continental lobby shootout contrasts sharply with the more kinetic presentation of something from The Matrix or The Killer. However, within the patience of the editing, it’s able to present a gunfight in a really novel way. Armor-clad enemy types aren’t just popped like balloons in an arcade game, they’re hit-stunned and manipulated around the environment as if the bullets themselves are choreographed. The gunfights almost function as though they were fistfights.
Later, Wick enters through a door cast in red lighting, before moving into an area with a glowing swimming pool. It mirrors his infiltration of the Red Circle club where he enters an almost identical room to hunt Iosef. Likewise, the lobby shootout feels like a large-scale recreation of the home invasion from the first film. Echoes of previous locations, action beats, and enemy types are remixed in a way that feels new, but also marking our progress. I guess one might see this as running out of ideas, but I prefer the George Lucas School of Poetry & Positive Thinking; it rhymes.
You’ve also got Wick joining forces at a couple key junctures with Lance Reddick and, most impressively, Halle Berry — who could easily have her own Atomic Blonde. It’s one thing to endure the same training regimen as Keanu at over 50, but she also had to become an animal trainer to help coordinate her screen time with two Belgian Malinois shepherd dogs. This sequence features some of the best animal stunt-work I’ve seen, and it’s worth the price of admission by itself. Animal combat assists aren’t just novel and cool, they’re extremely difficult to implement and not even worth the trouble for most action films.
That’s kind of the whole deal with this movie, though. It’s an action showcase, so everything is worth the trouble. Going through the trouble of delivering something great seems to be what motivates the entire cast and crew. The struggle is part of the reward. Everyone interviewed about these movies seems to acknowledge the difficulty, but also the desire to make something special. They understand why we watch action movies, and they want to maintain a certain standard, even if it sometimes comes at the expense of intriguing plotting or resonate emotional components.
Given the current landscape of cinema (and America, in general) it’s hard to imagine we’ll be getting a sequence where someone rides a horse through Brooklyn again anytime soon. Have we seen the last great American action film to be released in theaters? It seems absurd to suggest, until you consider the complicated nature of location shooting in a place like New York City while dealing with a global pandemic which has paralyzed an industry ready to crack under its own weight while competing with increasingly popular alternatives of streaming media in an era where it might just be better to stay home. There will assuredly be other action films on the horizon, and maybe you’ll even get to enjoy them in a theater. I just don’t expect to see anything like this again anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong.
I remember a certain film critic jokingly tweeting something about (I’m paraphrasing here) future generations enjoying footage of Chapter 3 in the bombed-out, apocalyptic remains of a bus — which seemed a little too cynical at the time.
*looks around* A lot can change in a year, I tell you what.
I think time will be very kind to this movie, assuming we have much of that left. I think of how unique and rare the partnership of the lead actor and director is in this context — and the roadmap that brought them to this point. I think of how valuable a cinematographer like Dan Laustsen has been to the overall aesthetic. I can see the creativity and enthusiasm of ideas from people at a stage in their careers where it’s just not normal to invest this much of their lives into a mid-budget action film. I didn’t even talk about my favorite scene, which amounts to a snowball fight with knives! I didn’t mention Mark Dacascos, the Raid alumni, or the classical use of professional basketball players as henchman.
I don’t know what the future holds for filmmaking, for America, or for Mr. Wick — but if it all ends with a battle-scarred Laurence Fishburne laughing at death while sipping Fanta then I’m good with that.
