John Wick: Chapter 4 review – an honest-to-God action masterpiece

At the end of John Wick 3, our beloved titular Baba Yaga had been shot clean off of a skyscraper roof, yet there was never any question that he’d be coming back. It’s in this mythic grandeur that the third instalment slightly slipped up, spending too much time world-building at the expense of the action we’d all come to witness. Somehow, though, Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves have managed to turn this weakness into a strength for John Wick: Chapter 4, a capital-E “Epic” of international action that is not just the best in the series, but an honest-to-God action masterpiece.

There’s a lot of plot to chew through in John Wick 4 (hence the gargantuan, near-three-hour running time), but Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch marshal it with an intuitive grace. Now hunted by almost every assassin in the world at the behest of the enigmatic assassin rulers The High Table, with a psychotic new leader in the form of the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard, basically playing Heath Ledger’s Joker if he had a ripe French accent and a few billion in the bank), John has to kill everyone, everywhere, all at once.

Immaculately paced, the story flings us between Paris, Osaka, and Berlin, each city receiving its own bevy of staggering action set-pieces. Ever since the first one, which now seems positively quaint, the fundamental joys of John Wick have been fluid motion and brutal violence, and both of these are the best they’ve ever been here, putting Reeves through the absolute wringer. Fist-fights in speeding traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, tumbles down endless flights of stairs, and the addition of bow-and-arrow-fu to the franchise’s arsenal are just a few of the sensational fights and stunts put to camera here. Whenever you think to yourself, “Well, they can’t top that,” of course, they do – there’s a particular crane shot oner here that is just annihilatingly fun.

The relentless of the action could get exhausting in a lesser team’s hands, but Stahelski knows exactly when a new element needs to be introduced, or, perhaps even more importantly, when an idea needs to be chucked away. Nothing outstays its welcome, and the sense of fun is pretty much omnipresent. Things slow down just enough to introduce us to a veritable army of new characters, from pop star Rina Sawayama making an incredibly convincing film debut as a lethal archer, to DTV action legend Scott Adkins popping up for a bruising fight within a fat suit as a lumbering German crime lord.

Pick of the bunch, though, is Donnie Yen, who is better than perfect as blind assassin Caine, forced to fight John to save his daughter from the High Table’s clutches. His fights are ferocious (and very funny), and he sells the emotional crescendos with sublime skill, an ingenious addition to the Wick-verse (don’t worry, the old guard get their licks in too, from Laurence Fishburne having the time of his life to a bittersweet farewell to the tragically departed Lance Reddick). Stahelski and Reeves have both recently said that this Wick is likely to be the last one, at least for a while, which is a shame, but what an astounding high to go out on.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is released in UK cinemas on 24 March.