John & Mr. Wick

It's been almost a month from the release of John Wick 4. It did great by all standards but, as I stated in my review, there's something that feels a little off with it.

I had a hint of this feeling watching the third chapter but I shook that off pretty easily, thinking that the fourth (already announced at the time) would make it disappear.

I'm talking about the lack of exploration of our dear Mr. Wick from an emotional perspective.

Beside the masterfully crafted action scenes, the first chapter brought to light a new way of introducing an anti-hero.

We all remember the scene where Viggo (the boss of a big criminal organization) tells his son who that "fucking nobody" truly is.

Is that introduction to a protagonist that makes the scene unbelievably effective. That single scene leaves us glued to the screen for the rest of the movie.

Genius writing and fantastic performance from the actors, made that possible.

After it, the film slowly gives us hints around John's "previous" life in a way that lets us understand his emotions and why he's considerd a legend.

This exploration of the protagonist goes on in the second chapter, with a movie that works on the action without forgetting the emotional side, with scenes like the killing of the head of the d'Antonio family and her friendship with John.

So, what changes in the third?

From a tecnichal perspective almost nothing, with a little wink at John's superhuman durability. 😅

We have the same formula from the 2nd, amped up to 💯 of course.

But

We lose John and we get Mr. Wick : the babayaga.

And you might ask, what do you mean with this?

The phrase makes almost no sense, i know.

I am trying to say that we lose our emotional focus on the protagonist (John), hence we are left with Babayaga.

The movie takes almost no real interest in further developing him, instead it focuses on expanding the assassin's world and introducing new characters.

It's not bad per se but, if one of the reasons that your previous movies worked is the complexity of Keanu's character, you can't afford to lose sight of it without injuring your result.

This lack of focus is amped up to a 1000 in the fourth chapter of course.

I think that this problem has Big Studios💰 fingerprints all over it. They saw an opportunity to print money and, maybe, pressured the productions, forcing the writers and the director to focus only on "action and expansion" to enable the franchise to grow, prosper and print more money.

All of this to say that the probable direction of this franchise is similar to the trainwreck that Marvel is now.🙁

Thank you for reading 🙏

If you have any suggestions or critic feel free to reply😁

This friday i’ll review “65”

Have a great week✌️

Nicolò