John Wick Chapter 4: Keanu Reeves’s Assassin Kills Again in Marvel-Sized Sequel

John Wick Chapter 4: With the first John Wick (2014), Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski established a franchise that soars above most action films. Merging an artful aesthetic with brilliantly choreographed and shot fight scenes, it set a standard matched in its three sequels, including the latest, John Wick: Chapter 4. Knives, guns, swords and martial arts come into play, often in lovely, red-tinged light to the sound of glass shattering all around. The violence is just cartoonish enough not to be truly disturbing, at least most of the time.

In Chapter 4 of this story, John Wick’s vendetta has forced the Table into open warfare, and it thrives on John’s acceptance of the fact that even he can’t win that war on his own. The rules and consequences the John Wick universe has taken such care to establish provide its fourth chapter a rock-solid structure that allows for director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves to stage an symphony of onscreen action, with every component driving to elevate the others.

With each subsequent John Wick film, though, Stahelski and company have further expanded the world in which the series is set, exploring the inner workings of the council of crime lords known as the High Table and the various rules and consequences that regulate behavior in specific settings and situations.

They’ve continued to add new fetishistic objects as signifiers of broad ideas—honor, loyalty, professionalism, you name it—as well as flashier sets. And in this gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is 2 hours and 49 minutes long, but it has a story that, if it were told more briskly, could fit into an 83-minute potboiler that you might have seen in a grindhouse in 1977.

Yet the way that Chad Stahelski, the series’ stuntman-turned-director, has staged it, full of hushed, portentous, ritualistic verbal showdowns that are meant to be hypnotic as they build up to each new action scene, “Chapter 4” feels like the first “John Wick” movie that wants to be a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western. It’s like Sergio Leone crossed with John Woo as seen in Times Square.

Ironically, Chapter 4 is as much a film of its time as John Wick was a rejoinder to the Hollywood of its time. Back in 2014, Stahelski’s stripped-down film, as it followed its all-action-no-talk hero’s lurid killing spree, felt like an antidote to so many Hollywood action films that, to this day, are needlessly bloated, convoluted, and packed to the gills with mediocre CGI.

The twist in Chapter 4 is that John Wick goes full James Bond, globe-trotting and shooting his way through glamorous cities, with action that is even more spectacularly staged. Running at 2 hours and 49 minutes, it is bigger than the previous films in every way ­– not better or worse, just more.