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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 3/28/2026

John Wick

Ooo...edge-lord alert!

Why do the John Wick movies...leave me cold?

Why are they overlong slogs of poorly thought out worldbuilding, self-seriousness, and and self-indulgent senses of coolness that just bore me to tears?

Why do these movies make so much money? Granted, removing Keanu Reeves from a starring role in the spin-off (he has an extended, mostly pointless cameo sprinkled throughout), Ballerina: From the World of John Wick seemed to hurt the last entry's ability to make money at the box office (it pretty obviously lost money considering its reported $90 million budget and $137 million haul at the worldwide box office), but my main focus is the four main entries themselves. I've seen Ballerina, and it does have some of the same problems as the first four, but it fixes one of my main complaints while creating others.

Could these movies have been written...better? Could they have covered the same ground but just been compelling in the interminable two hours of each film that wasn't dedicated to action?

The Movies As They Are

Okay, I actually like the first entry. John Wick is a simple story of revenge that lasts for a grand 100 minutes (including credits) that is a thin reed on which to hang action sequences. The clear emotionality is just enough to support the action, make it all make sense, and make it compelling enough to watch in between the action beats. It's not great drama, but it's functional and clear. There are clear moments where it's obvious the creative team is inventing reasons for the movie to keep going, inventing reasons for Wick to not take revenge on the Russian gangster punk who killed his dog just so the movie can keep going. It's the ravages of making a supernaturally gifted assassin one's main character.

However, it does come other things as well. It implies relationships with Wick talking to figures from his past in cryptic terms about who he is, what he's capable of, and how he got out of the assassin game. It works well enough in the first entry because it's about building a mythos around this central figure on a killing spree, but the writers and director took the exact wrong lesson from it.

Because every movie after that takes that approach to character as gospel. John meets someone, like the main antagonist of the second film, Santino, who forces John to re-enter the game by invoking a marker that John had to swear to in order to leave. (I assume this works with the first movie where it was that movie's bad guy who gave him the task, but whatever.)

So, the film spends more than thirty minutes getting John from his house to the target he's supposed to kill (Santino's sister) so that Santino can take her seat at The Table, the governing body of the assassin underworld, or whatever. And when he meets Gianna, Santino's sister, they imply some kind of deep history, talk in serious tones for a long stretch, and action finally breaks out.

The space between the action is...interminable. And there's a lot of space between the action. The action itself is quite good. Not perfect. There are moments where it's obvious people are just waiting for the next hit, but with so much action, not every beat of every fight is gonna slap. Really, the quality of the action is very, very high. It's just, there's so much of it, and the stuff in between is so boring that the action beats are extended demo reels for the stunt team and little else. They don't really mean much because John Wick ceases to be much of a character, the character interactions he has are mostly implied relationships of characters who appear only briefly before he's off to another locale to fight more faceless goons.

However, watching all of the films in a row made it obvious that there was an attempt at a larger story. It's just it's told really badly. The overall story is Wick being forced back into the life, him making the choice to either become a tool of the High Table or be free, and then his quest to destroy the High Table, effectively, to overturn the system. It's just that the movies are more concerned with looking cool than actually telling the story.

I'm deeply, deeply frustrated by the bloated, 2.5-3 hour sequels to the focused, 100-minute long original. And I thought that the problems wouldn't be that hard to fix from a screenwriting point of view. So, I sat down and wondered...if the director of the movies, Chad Stahelski, came to me before the filming of Chapter 2,handed me the three scripts for the second, third, and fourth entries and asked for a rewrite. I couldn't scrap them completely because they were already building sets, had cast everyone, and had practiced every fight for months. I needed to keep the major elements, but I could change dialogue, rearrange scenes, expand and contract roles. That sort of thing.

So, what would I do?

Rewrites


I've had Dante's Inferno on the brain for a bit, and my first direction would be to take the ending of the first movie as a death. He's following his wife, Helen, into a metaphorical death. Each of the three following movies would be concerned with three circles of Hell each.

John Wick: Chapter 2, Limbo, Lust, and Gluttony

Wick makes his way home, and he's confronted by the fact that he's alone. He has no one anymore. He reflects on Helen, his passed wife, and then he starts to think of the people he had before he left the life. He focuses on Gianna, the last woman he loved before he met Helen. Lost and without purpose, he tries to contact her, but the five years away from the life has made it difficult. He wanders the haunts he had with her, but he's seen by Killa Harkan (a character from Chapter 4). Grotesquely overweight, he dangles the promise of meeting Gianna. John must kill someone for him, and he will let him know where Gianna is.

So, John takes the job, and he goes to Rome to kill the target, a woman. After fighting through a host of goons, it turns out that the target is Gianna herself. She asks him why he's doing this. He doesn't know. He doesn't ask. That's not the job. But, now that he has what was promised him, he feels the need to break the contract. However, she gets hit by a second assassin (Cassian, played by Common) sent by Harkan to make sure the job is done.

It becomes a chase to get to Harkan. John versus Cassian as John wants further vengeance, and we enter into Gluttony with Harkan being a king of excess, and when John ultimately gets Harkan, Harkan tells him that he was just following orders from Gianna's brother, Santino, because he can take her place at the High Table upon her death. That ends the first sequel.

John Wick: Chapter 3, Greed, Anger, and Heresy

We start in media res with John fights his way towards Santino in his mansion in Paris. Upon reaching something like a throne room, John is stopped by the presence of the Adjudicator. The Adjudicator confronts John, offering him whatever he wants in order to stop. He's killed too many of the High Table's agents, and they are willing to pay any price to get him to stop. However, the conversation cuts to the core of why John is doing what he's doing. She knows why he left in the first place. It wasn't love. It was because he knew that the work he did was evil, and he needed to get out. He's on a rampage because of his wife? His dog? Gianna, a woman he hadn't even thought of for five years? John can have Santino as long as John is done after that, but what does he actually want?

John sets out to find Santino, and he's in Arabia. John goes and meets with Sofia (Halle Berry) who helps him get into Santino's fortress where he fights through hordes of people to get to Santino, eventually killing him. The Adjudicator arrives, and offers him everything he wants, but he has to say what it is. What he actually wants is...blood. He only lives for violence. So, she offers him Santino's spot on the High Table.

On the High Table, John becomes ruthless, ordering the execution of his enemies, becoming the evil, embracing the heresy, that he had tried to escape.

John Wick: Chapter 4, Violence, Fraud, and Treason

John has become a tyrant of the High Table, and a rebellion is brewing against him. But not only is he a tyrant, he's a general who leads his men into battle. In Arabia, he strikes out against the palace of the fellow High Table member the Marquis. John leads a dozen men on an assault on the palace, killing everyone in his path in order to get to his target, an impediment to his power. He confronts the Marquis who has a trump card. He has dug up Helen's coffin and uses it as a bargaining chip. Defended by the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), the Marquis makes a deal. He will bend to Wick's vision of the table, not desecrate Helen's dead body, and nominate John to be the High Commander of the Table if John does something for him. John must go to Japan and prove that the owner of the Osaka Continental, Koji, has defrauded the High Table.

John agrees, and he goes to Osaka. There, he confronts Koji, an old friend, and learns that yes, Koji has been defrauding the High Table for years. However, it's because of the corruption of the High Table that he did it. This conversation reveals to John the depths into which he's sunk. Thinking he was in control, he realizes that he's only been the tool of corruption, a last gasp effort by the High Table to recruit him rather than have him dismantle them. So, he decides that he must turn traitor to the High Table but also deal with the fact that he had become a traitor to Helen in re-embracing the life he'd promised to leave.

John heads to New York and the Continental run by Winston, recruits the help of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), and becomes the one man killing machine against the High Table once more. He fights through his goons to find the High Table together, and he must execute them all. The fight leaves him fatally wounded, and he succumbs to his wounds, dying.

We fade to black, and we hear Helen's voice calling out for John.

No More than a Thought Exercise


The main problem I have with the overall feel of the actual sequels is that despite there being something like an overall story from one entry to the next, it's approached with such lack of care that it might as well not be there. John ends up just being a killing machine moving from one action sequence and thin interaction with a character with an unexplained backstory to the next. I want some kind of structure imposed on it, some kind of real progression of his character.

I really don't think there is one, that the John at the start of Chapter 2 is still the same at the end of Chapter 4, that he's nothing more than a cipher caught in someone else's plot for the vast majority of things, and that he has little agency. From the moment Santino shows up the marker and forces him back into the game, instead of John choosing to go back, the sequels are off the rails, forcing John into situations rather than having him guide himself. He does kind of gain his own direction in the fourth film, but it's very little very late, and we have so much obsession with other characters, lore, and world-building around rules of the organization that Wick ends up something of a side character in his own franchise.

Imposing a stronger structure from the beginning, borrowing from something like Inferno and having an eye towards John's journey first and foremost would have tremendously helped the sequels.

To No Avail


Chad Stahelski did not some to me before production and ask for my help. I am just a nobody off in the hinterlands wondering if I could have found a better way to give the people who love the 1/3 of these films that are no-holds barred action a bit more to grasp onto in between those action sequences.

The movies got really long, really obsessed with self-important world-building, and lost sight of its central, eponymous character really quickly. And I do not understand the money they made and their relative popularity.

Do people really remain gripped in between the action scenes? Or do they wander off, look at their phones, and do other things as they wait for the sound of gunshots and pumping music to reappear? I imagine that there are some, but I am not one of them. All of the praise I hear of the films is the action itself. The stuff in between could use some punching up, right?

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

They Will Kill You

Forbidden Fruits

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Rossiter Case (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not the most involving thing, but it's a good melodrama that understands what it needs to do and how to do it." [Library]

To Have and to Hold (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I mean, the films' not bad, but it kind of makes no real sense and doesn't connect. It's very bland and a bit frustrating." [YouTube]

A Case for PC 49 (Rating 1/4) Full Review "The whole "based on a BBC radio serial" was mostly a mark of warning in this era, it seems." [YouTube]

Cloudburst (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Pure noir with a solid emotional foundation and good performances, very well filmed by Searle, but with an ending that just doesn't quite hit the way it should." [YouTube]

Death of an Angel (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it's handsome but rather inert." [YouTube]

The Last Page (or, Man Bait) (Rating 3/4) Full Review "And the end result is a tense, knowing thriller that works solidly well. Welcome to the Hammer club, Mr. Fisher. I think you'll be a welcome addition." [YouTube]

Wings of Danger (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's not good, but it's a mild entertainment that looks good while it plays things out." [YouTube]

Never Look Back (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It functions, and no more. It's unexciting and largely unmemorable, but it works. Kind of." [Library]

Do check out my other recent videos:
A Tour of My Movie Collection
Thoughts on Megamind
My celebration of a Bogus Journey
My complaints about the Oscars
Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 4/18 and it will discuss something or other.