Shout-Out to the Extra: John Wick: Chapter 4 Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

Among the most famous entries of the late Roger Ebert’s so-called Movie Glossary was “Fruit Cart,” defined thusly: “An expletive used by film buffs during any chase scene involving a foreign or ethnic locale, reflecting their certainty that a fruit cart will be overturned during the chase, and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street to shake his face at the departing Porsche.” These fruit cart peddlers are sentient extras, in other words, nameless, non-speaking roles that briefly emerge from the periphery to, in their way, comment on the action. One of the most spectacular sequences of the recently released (and reviewed) “John Wick: Chapter 4” contains a whole host of fruit cart peddlers reimagined as club-goers, though one stands above the rest in commenting on the action by, in fact, not commenting on the action at all. 

The specifics of this sequence both are and are not important. Suffice to say that in pursuing the sequence’s preeminent Bad Guy (Scott Adkins) through a Berlin club, our hero John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has to fight his way through an assortment of auxiliary bad guys to reach him, meaning he must wade through so many gyrating revelers, including one gyrating reveler so memorable I snapped a mental picture as she flew by.

It’s a little murky, I know, and I apologize, but it was the best I could do. That guy on the floor, his legs kicked out in the air, that’s John Wick, having just been hurled there by the preeminent Bad Guy towering over him. And you can see how some of the other extras react, like the guy over the preeminent Bad Guy’s left shoulder, freaking out at this savage fight, and even this guy over here to the left, next to our marked extra, who looks over his own left shoulder with some confusion and concern. And though it might appear that our marked extra is looking at them too, she is not, I assure you. Seriously, the still does not do her movement justice, sort of Sprockets as Gumby, the kind of extemporaneous choreography that goes hand-in-hand with 135 beats per minute. And though her thrusts and half-twists briefly turns her toward the hand-to-hand combat, she does not really even seem to register it, too far gone in her spastic groove.

The dancers, as I wrote in my review, are there to mirror the dance-like quality of John Wick’s countless one-on-one battles. But John Wick’s ferocious quest for serenity mirrors the dancers, too, suggesting how they are all there, to quote her eminence Kylie, to “lose it in the music.” And our heroic extra has decided in her brief moment of tangential screen time, that her character is not, even now, while death and mayhem is happening all around her, going to let herself be found, a commitment no less noble than John Wick’s. 

Pour one out for the extra. 

John Wick: Chapter 4

The original “John Wick” (2014) was not merely a straight-forward revenge thriller but purposely, even humorously, stripped of reality, reducing the world to good guys and bad guys. Its sequels, Chapters 2 and 3, took the movie’s peripheral world, especially its assassins-only hotel called The Continental, and expanded it. This choice did not necessarily render those follow-ups more convoluted, or even less than good, though by the conclusion of the third, “Parabellum,” you could still detect a creeping enervation, the action movie needle tilting more toward zero than sixty. In deciding to end things with “John Wick: Chapter 4,” however, director Chad Stahelski might further augment his cinematic universe with ornate codes and rituals, but he also puts his eponymous character on a clock, sculpting a movie of baroque valleys and blood-splattered peaks that are adroitly divvied out to ensure this is one two hour and forty-nine-minute movie that never too obscenely wears its running time.

Stahelski is not shy about quoting influences, like his editor Nathan Orloff cutting from a match to the desert a la Ann V. Coates’s famous work in “Lawrence of Arabia,” or the underworld intelligence agent The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) literally quoting Dante’s Inferno as “John Wick: Chapter 4” opens. This moment, though, in which Wick pounds his bloodied fist again and again against an inanimate board while The Bowery King goads him on made me think more of Bundini Brown as hype man to Muhammad Ali, equating the eponymous hero with a heavyweight champ readying for one more bout. It’s evocative of the waggishness defining the series and concluding chapter too, like in the emergent villain, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård). Sending up our own world while taking place in its own, the Marquis crystallizes a burgeoning sort of modern aristocracy, never more hilariously than when he has one of the Louvre’s Red Rooms set up with a chic sofa set for a tête-à-tête. If you can’t bring Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau to your living room, bring your living room to Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau!

The Marquis has been dispatched by the High Table that runs the “John Wick” world to put John Wick himself in a casket once and for all, which is what everyone has been trying to do for going on four movies, a recurring joke that once again fails to run dry because Skarsgard’s smarminess amusingly embodies a supremely self-impressed belief that his attempt will be different. John Wick, however, turns the tables by utilizing his intricate world’s customs to challenge the Marquis to a duel, a ploy suggested by his ever-present hotelier cohort Winston, the as-always debonair Ian McShane imbuing so much exposition with patented breezy regality. This duel, of course, can’t just happen, necessitating John Wick jump through a number of hoops by way of globe-trotting spectacle, all culminating in a sunrise showdown at the Sacré Coeur.

Like the preceding three films, the action here proves almost endlessly inventive, both conceptually and visually, in ways both small and large, from the joyfully modest tradecraft of a blind assassin (Donnie Yen) enlisted by the Marquis to collect on Wick’s head to sensational location work that is rarely mere backdrop. The complicated traffic rules surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris pave the way for a unique car chase / gunfight blend while a mammoth Montmartre staircase transforms Rocky Balboa’s ascension of the Philadelphia Library steps into a cosmically foiled Buster Keaton stunt, breathing new life into the hoary phrase Pick Yourself Up and Try Again. Reviews aren’t the place for Oscar prognostication but I’m not prognosticating when I simply point out Stahelski has argued for the inclusion of a Best Stunt Academy Award, and that I say give the inaugural one to Vincent Bouillon. 

It is 222 steps John Wick climbs to the Sacré Coeur, allowing for multiple landings in-between, each of which becomes a kind of dance floor of wild action, evoking the dance-like quality of this movie and the series in general. Indeed, a lengthy setpiece at a waterfall-strewn Berlin club is filled to the brim with dancers, their exertions mirroring choreographed bloody mayhem all around them. Stahelski shoots these scenes not only with a fluid camera but in long takes and wide takes, allowing us to clearly see the full scope of the action. As impressive as it, however, there can come a point where an assembly line sensation to these nameless, inevitable foils creeps in, effecting a weariness that might have weighed the whole project down if Reeves, whittling his dialogue down to virtually nothing, did not embody that weariness as his character’s own, a man mowing so many other men down so he can finally find peace. John Wick might be the most skilled assassin alive, but in one shot atop an Osaka hotel decorated with a cherry blossom tree, he just looks like another melancholy figure in a Japanese floral painting.  

John Wick

“John Wick” is like a John Woo film made by a very cerebral Team ZAZ, Le Samourai with a doctorate in Mel Brooks. It’s a stoic farce. It embraces every last trope of Gun-Fu genre to the hilt, right down to its mockingly serviceable title, a placeholder for any veteran of the action thriller crusades wishing to lampoon his image by being deadly serious about it. Enter: Keanu Reeves. He grimaces through the entire production like he doesn’t get the joke, which is apropos because he’s the straight man in a wildly stylized sketch.

As the film opens, his wife (Bridgit Moynihan) has just passed away from an unnamed disease, and all we see of her are fleeting images on John Wick’s smartphone where she floats in the technological ether, the place, I assume, we all go these days when we die. Her spirit, however, lives on in the form of a precious puppy she scheduled for delivery to her husband ahead of her passing. Alas, we get but a few scenes this adorable canine before it is unceremoniously stomped and killed by an arrogant son (Alfie Allen) of a Russian Mafioso who then steals Wick’s car and beats him up real good only because he has no idea his victim is John Wick. See, John Wick, we learn, isn’t The Boogeyman – he’s the dude you send to execute The Boogeyman. He’s a retired hitman of the highest order, once in cahoots with Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), the arrogant son’s pops, convenient sort of plotting that “John Wick” turns with a good-natured guffaw.

The world here comes across wholly, intentionally insular, as if it’s only populated with bad men or bad men trying to be good. I half-suspect that Bridgit Moynihan was akin to Claire Forlani in “Mystery Men”, wherein you can’t help but wonder how in the hell she wound up in Champion City. When John Wick decides to re-enter the game he says it’s “personal”, not business, because he has to, but it feels as if he was simply chilling in his home with the plethora of open space and ginormous windows that’s just begging for a shootout and hoping, praying, that someone will stir something up so he could go on a rampage.

World-building is the film’s high point. Consider the hotel where Wick checks in, the Continental, sort of a B&B spin on The Facility of “Cabin in the Woods.” It is not so much a hideout for assassins and hit men as a known refuge, a luxuriously accommodated safe zone lorded over by a majestically suave Ian McShane where there are strict rules about no killing and leaving your business associates to themselves. Lance Reddick runs the front desk with a twinkle in his eye, a performance that is sitting on a two-hour backstory, and frankly, “John Wick” might have been absolutely stellar as its own version of “Casino” (“Continental”?) in following this palace’s rise and inner-workings.

Almost as good is the neon-lit bathhouse where John Wick begins his quest for retribution, a crisply concocted sequence scored majestically to Kaleida that evokes an other-worldly sensation the rest of the film’s unfortunate hard-rocking soundtrack does not. He dips and darts through the elaborate set, dispatching nefarious dudes with bullets and karate chops as blood splatters and limbs break, looking like a dancer in an electronica ballet. It’s freaking heaven, and if the main character’s invincibility is obvious, well, duh. Of course, it is! The film revels in that obviousness, underscored by the deadpan shot of Tarasov in front of a fire with a glass of cognac, awaiting the inevitable, more or less writing off his son’s life even though he knows he has to try and avenge him anyway. “John Wick” takes bad guy code to the extreme.

Then again, that’s also its downfall. After about an hour the film’s style and cheeky humor begins running on fumes, and just sort of gives way into the worse aspects of the product with which it’s been carousing. Oh, the obligatory finale in the rainstorm looks good, yes, but it’s devoid of the rambunctious spirit of the preceding hour. It’s just duplicating moves, not duplicating and expanding, and so it thuds to a disappointing conclusion. It’s one vacation you wish would have taken place entirely at the hotel.