Director – Chad Stahelski – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 169m
** The first hour or so.
***** The last hour and a half or so.
The eponymous assassin is given a path to follow that will rid him and others of his obligations to shadowy organisation The High Table once and for all – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 24th
The fourth episode in the John Wick franchise is not a film to come to without seeing the previous three first – and in the recent past, so they’re fresh in your memory. That was the mistake this reviewer made. Too much in the first hour or so refers back to what has gone before. Characters wander through vast urban or other sets (there’s an early sequence in the open North African desert) often spouting ponderous dialogue.
This works if you have an actor of the calibre of Ian McShane, who plays Winston, the deferential owner of the New York Continental Hotel, and, perhaps surprisingly, it also works with the franchise’s action star Keanu Reeves, who has got the delivery of grunts and one word dialogue lines (“yeah”) down to a fine art.
Even so, the surfeit of overly talky scenes in the first hour or so tends towards the tedious.… Read the rest