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John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017; Directed by Chad Stahelski)

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019; Directed by Chad Stahelski)

I have to admit that I underestimated John Wick when I wrote about it three years ago. The 2014 Keanu Reeves-fronted stylishly brutal and subversively emotionally cathartic action movie (directed by his stunt double from The Matrix, Chad Stahelski, along with uncredited partner, producer, and ex-stuntman David Leitch) got labelled a well-crafted potboiler with a twisted sense of empathy and, well, on I moved. I did speculate that there seemed to be considerable room for the John Wick universe to grow in sequels in terms of its crime-underrealm world-building, so perhaps I can claim a small victory of prescience for clocking, if only in passing and without the forethought of the strange evocative power to come, how these movies became both the past decade’s impeccable and bar-raising trilogy of action flicks and it’s most grandly mythic pop-art morality plays as well.

John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (which we will henceforth refer to as John Wick 2 and John Wick 3 or Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 for brevity’s sake) dive deep into the mythology established in the first film and make it the water these latter two stories float in. We learn in John Wick 2 that Wick’s world is one peopled by secret contract assassins and ruled by a mysterious crimeboss cabal known as the High Table. There are a strict and binding set of rules laid down and enforced by the High Table that all who serve this council of the powerful are subject to, which includes not only hitmen like John Wick but managers of the sanctuary Continental Hotels like New York’s Winston (Ian McShane) and Rome’s Julius (Franco Nero), who provide refuge and equipment for the cost of gold coins, the currency of this underworld earned by killing (John Wick has earned a lot) that are just one of several elements of these movies that evoke video game tropes.

Another vital currency are the Markers, blood-oath tokens whose debts to the holders cannot be disregarded by the givers except on pain of death (there’s lots of death and pain in play here, literal certainly but also more figurative). John, it turns out, owes the ambitious and coldly conniving Camorra gangster Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio, an Italian Michael Shannon by way of genre character actor Marton Csokas) for helping him to get out of the assassin game, which if you recall from the first film he did to be with his now-deceased wife Helen and quite emphatically got back into to avenge the killing by callous Slavic mob punks of a puppy she posthumously gifted him. Santino holds a Marker for this debt that he was content to allow to gather dust if John stayed retired but is calling upon John to pay back now that he is un-retired. Very early in its sequel, the cathartic revenge violence of the initial John Wick movie spins off into unglimpsed and difficult moral consequences, and not for the last time in the trilogy. Some franchises made separately can play loose with narrative consistency, but the John Wick movies pin every consequential choice to the board like an exacting and pitiless butterfly collector, a moral specimen to be recalled and reckoned with (having a consistent director in Stahelski and a consistent writer in Derek Kolstad through all three movies probably helps with this).

Santino informs John that to fulfill the oath of the Marker, the returned “Boogeyman” must kill Santino’s sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) so that he can take her place on the High Table. John refuses, insisting that he’s still out of the game, and Santino firebombs Wick’s house and burns it to the ground in response (fortunately, John’s new dog, an unnamed bully breed who is a very good boy, escapes with his owner, and evades harm throughout the rest of the two sequels, you’ll be glad to hear). Thus chastened and reluctantly accepting his task, John travels to Italy to do the deed (though it doesn’t shake out how you might expect), which sets Gianna’s goons after him (most prominently prior acquaintance Cassian, played by Common) as well as earning a contract on his life from Santino, no doubt to disguise his own culpability in his sister’s death. But there is no evading consequences for anyone in Wickworld, and after John kills his way through legions of foes, he comes for Santino and rashly finishes the job on the hallowed safe ground of the Continental.

So John Wick ends Chapter 2 and enters Chapter 3 with a $7 million price on his head and an “excommunicado” order, both placed by erstwhile ally and father figure Winston, barring him from any aid or succour from the vast criminal underworld’s network of agents and safehouses. He finds some regretful and even somewhat hostile comrades in the Bowery King (a glint-in-his-eye Laurence Fishburne, Reeves’ Matrix co-star, who delightfully drops a joke about spending Wick’s contract prize money at Applebee’s and appears at the end of Chapter 3 lit by low firelight and sitting on a golden throne while sipping Fanta through a straw), the pigeon-training boss of a network of homeless ninja street agents introduced in John Wick 2, and then in Sofia (Halle Berry), a Casablanca resident and attack-dog trainer with whom Wick holds a Marker for aiding her in concealing her daughter for protection. Venturing into the desert to meet the Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui) who is the only figure with authority above the High Table, John Wick must sacrifice again for a chance to live and remember his beloved wife, but when his contract from the Elder against the disobedient Winston is thrown aside due to old loyalties, he must face down the might of a High Table assault squad as well as sword-wielding contract-killing martial-artist (and John Wick’s biggest fan) Zero (Mark Dacascos, who we have collectively failed and who should have been a massive action star instead of – or perhaps in addition to – the friggin’ Iron Chef Chairman).

That a fairly bare synopsis of this sort makes the John Wicks sound like pretty conventional action flick fare should not undersell on how consistently the action and the visuals and the mythos are elevated and top themselves as the movies go on. What I’ve been calling Wickworld is a rich and highly allusive frame setting, an act of dense comic-book-style world-building in the milieu of the usually simple and bloody-minded action genre. Movies with Mikey’s illuminating video essay on the first John Wick movie (he’s done videos on the other two movies as well) pointed out all of the parallels to Greek mythology in the film, thinking about how many characters are likened to Mount Olympus gods and mythological characters either symbolically (Winston as Zeus, Adrianne Palicki’s huntress assassin as Artemis, etc.) or quite literally (Lance Reddick’s Continental Hotel concierge is named Charon, like the ferryman of the underworld, and of course John’s wife Helen is the catalyst for his cataclysmic war as the Iliad‘s Helen was the catalyst for the Trojan War).

But Wickworld is also built from the visual motifs and mythological bones of Greek tragedy, Roman Catholicism, Islamic mystical art, Arthurian legend, architecture from classical Rome to Art Deco America, Gilded Age displays of luxe, Roma lore, Slavic folktales, and above all from the modern mythology of American cultural hegemony that is cinematic history: there are allusions and homages and references and sly repurposings all across these movies from deep in the filmic canon, from film noir to silent comedy (Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. is projected on the side of a building prior to the car and motorcycle chase that begins John Wick 2) to James Bond to surrealistic art films (there’s a reference to the infamous eyeball-cutting shock moment in the Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí film Un Chien Andalou, if you can believe that) to Asian martial arts films from Hong Kong to Japan to Korea to Indonesia (Reeves battles two cast members of cult Indonesian actioner The Raid late in Chapter 3). But the John Wick movies are hardly visual retreads; there is a strongly-established visual look to all three films of nightime noir cut through with high-contrast neon colour, founded by cinematographer Jonathan Sela in the first film and continued by the masterful Danish DoP Dan Laustsen (who shot Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water for Guillermo Del Toro as well as the wild French genre mashup Brotherhood of the Wolf, which starred Dacascos). Mikey Neumann gets into this more, as does video essayist Patrick H. Willems in his video on how the John Wick movies turn New York into an unpredictable and mysterious mythic setting.

But these are action movies, after all, and for all of the dense allusiveness of the world’s mythology, the John Wick movies never venture far from their core appeal: the gorgeous visceral magnificence of Keanu Reeves (who has spent the end of his 40s and his early 50s making these films) shooting lots of people in the head. Willems has another video grading every John Wick trilogy action sequence, and as a document of the remarkable feats of action filmmaking accomplishment on display here, it can’t be beat. Nor can John Wick‘s action scenes; there simply isn’t anything like them in any other movies. Eschewing both the balletic wire work of Hong Kong action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (who choreographed the fights in The Matrix) and the bone-crunching shaky-cam immediacy of the Bourne movies, John Wick‘s fights are constructed of sustained medium-wide shots, minimizing fast cuts and showing the totality of the movement, violence, and surrounding urban landscapes. They are brutally pragmatic but possessed with a beauty in their bluntness and intimacy, qualities reflected in the functional efficiency of Reeves’ choreographical profile as Wick (we can quibble all day about Keanu’s thespianic abilities, but in terms of physical movement, he’s an artist). They are often shot in visually striking settings, like the red-lit Circle Club in John Wick 1 or the hall of mirrors art exhibit that ends Chapter 2 or the opaque reflecting glass room (dotted with samurai artifacts in breakaway-glass display cases) at the climax of Chapter 3.

The best of them combine masterful choreography and stunt work and camera use with wild, guffaw-inducing creative invention derived from their settings, especially in the bar-raising third film. John and Sofia and her armoured attack dogs laying rousing waste to thugs in a Moroccan bazaar is one good example, while John killing a 7-foot-4-inch assassin (played by pro basketballer Boban Marjanovic) in the New York Public Library using only a book might be even better, but the absolute pinnacle has to be the extended running battle after the contract on Wick’s life kicks in at the start of the film, during which he fights off a gang of putative killers using the extensive bladed arsenal of an antique weapons museum before retreating to a stable to off more foes by having horses kick them in the head and then riding off on horseback and eliminating two chasing motorcyclists from the animal’s back (this is to say nothing of the later scene featuring swordfighting on motorcycles; seriously, the third movie is off the damned chain).

Matched with the depth of the mythological backdrop and the density of action invention is the intensity of the moral hazards that drive John Wick‘s stories, the way in which choices have consequences in a way that they rarely do in the video-game-esque logic of the action genre. Those consequences are increasingly serious and dire. The cathartic revenge fantasy of the first film (itself escalated by the fatalistic prideful loyalty of Wick’s mobster foes) is immediately complicated by the ultimatum of Santino’s Marker at the start of the second film; the emotional satisfaction of Wick’s puppy-avenging crusade is already blunted by Reeves’ very purposeful grim flattened affect in response to it, but becomes a step into the quicksand of this unforgiving underworld. The arc of John Wick’s fate in these three films bends away from justice and towards tragedy; with every adrenaline-pumping badass kill, he is further from the redemptive peace he sought with Helen.

Neumann’s Chapter 3 video is eloquent and perceptive about this thematic element: in his fateful audience with the Elder, John is asked what he wants to live for, and he doesn’t have a ready answer. Again, Reeves’ natural verbal reticence (reflective of a personal guardedness in his private life as well) maximizes this moment as Wick initially says nothing before retreating to the safe harbour of remembrance of Helen. But the effectively unsubtle thematic symbolism of these movies undercuts this assertion immediately: the Elder asks Wick to sacrifice a finger to be allowed to continue, and he chops off his ring finger and must give the wedding band to the Elder as collateral. Movies with Mikey notes this tragic dimension of John Wick’s moral identity by the third film, that transmuting his painful grief into vengeful wrath and dogged, diminished endurance has turned him back into the Angel of Death (Reeves returns to New York City in an all-black suit for the last act of Chapter 3; again, symbolism not subtle) that he vowed to cease being for his love of Helen. He has betrayed that love in the name of preserving it. We thrill at John Wick’s masterfully crafted feats of cathartic violence, but when ruminated upon, the catharsis curdles into existential dread. This is not an ascent but a fall. A man’s soul, clawed back at great cost, is being lost before our eyes. Greek tragedy indeed.