170 min | R | March 24, 2023 | Lionsgate
John Wick wants out. The High Table wants him dead. To win his freedom he has to fight his way across four cities and one impossibly long staircase, and the whole world is happy to take the contract.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is the franchise stripped down to its purest engine. The plot is a formality. The High Table, embodied by the Marquis Vincent de Gramont, declares John Wick a problem worth any expense, and John fights his way toward a duel that might end it. Chad Stahelski builds the film as a series of escalating arenas. This is a movie about a man who refuses to stop and a system that cannot let him.
Keanu Reeves plays Wick with almost no dialogue and total physical conviction. He carries grief in his shoulders and exhaustion in his walk, and the action reads as the only language he has left. Donnie Yen plays Caine, a blind assassin bound to the Table by a threat to his daughter, and he turns the role into the emotional center the film does not expect. Yen fights with a stillness that makes Reeves look frantic by comparison. Bill Skarsgard plays the Marquis as a preening aristocrat who never throws a punch and never needs to. Ian McShane returns as Winston and Laurence Fishburne returns as the Bowery King, and both treat the ritual language of this world with complete seriousness.
Stahelski directs from a script by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch that exists to deliver the set pieces. The standout is an overhead shot of a Paris apartment building rendered in top-down view, where the camera tracks Wick through rooms while incendiary rounds light the screen like a video game. The Arc de Triomphe sequence stages combat inside a roundabout of speeding traffic, and the editing holds shots long enough to prove the stunt work is real. The Osaka hotel battle uses production design as choreography, with glass cases and sliding screens becoming weapons and cover. The fight against the staircase below Sacre-Coeur turns gravity itself into an opponent.
Chapter 4 understands exactly what it is and refuses to pretend otherwise. The story is thin because the story is not the point. The point is the staging, the discipline of the camera, and the willingness to let an action beat run until it earns its payoff. Stahelski has made a film that treats violence as ceremony and means it.