John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

Rated R for ultra-violence and language.  It's funny, because I remember being kind of grossed out by the violence in the first John Wick movie, but was oddly cool with the violence in this one.  If anything, the violence is only ramped up.  If anyone wants to talk about how movies desensitize us, use the John Wick movie as your foundation.  R.

DIRECTOR: Chad Stahelski

I'd like to apologize for how bad my writing has been this week.  I took a longer break than normal and binged all my viewed films so I could get a break.  But then I came back and had to play catch up on the few movies I watched during that break and now just feel overwhelmed.  Also, ity was my birthday and I didn't feel like devoting a bunch of mental energy to writing well.  So if that Super Mario Bros. blog is hot trash, I apologize.  That was an exercise in endurance rather than finesse.

So I've caught up!  I went from, "I'm never watching another John Wick movie" to watching and oddly loving John Wick: Chapter 2.  I was fairly insufferable for the past two weeks, by the way.  I really wanted to watch Chapter 3 while part 2 was still fresh in my mind, but I didn't own it.  Did I consider buying it?  Yeah, I did.  I stared at a $14 Blu-Ray copy at Walmart for a really long time.  I also considered buying a $22 three-pack, despite the fact that I probably won't watch the movie again.  I could have just watched it on Peacock, but I hated watching Chapter 2 with commercials.  Then I started asking anyone I knew if they owned the movie and if I could borrow it.  I then got confirmation that no one buys physical media anymore and the era of lending movies is dead.  I don't even want to start the discussion on how I might be the last guy who is anti-piracy.  But I waited and got it on DVD.com (Netflix's DVD at home service).  But now that's dying so I hope I'm never in a John Wick 3 quandry again.

Here's my complex thoughts on John Wick 3.  (Good writers tend to write "Here's..." and then just dive into their thoughts.)  John Wick 3 both simultaneously pays off the promises of the cliffhanger of 2, but also kind of nerfs the entire thing as well. At the end of Chapter 2, we're given the knowledge that John has an hour to get his affairs in order before he's the target of every assassin in the world. Because this is the world of John Wick, everything is ramped up to eleven.  It's almost absurd how society works in John Wick because apparently most people are assassins.  (Remind me to get back to my evaluation of the nerfing in a minute because I really need to talk about this.)  The John Wick movies really want you not to think too hard about how employment works in John Wick. At the end of Chapter 2, it shows everyone getting text messages saying that John is now a target.  Like, it's John Wick v. the Planet.  That's super cool, but absolutely bonkers.  The first one is "Why?"  Why did everyone decided that professional hitman is the most normal job imaginable?  But the bigger question is, "Why all the secrecy."

The thing that makes John Wick kind of cool is the odd secret world beneath what we call "normal".  I guess Keanu Reeves really likes movies where he takes a pill that lets him see how the world really operates.  (Hey, Lawrence Fishburne is also in these movies!)  But if everyone is in on the secret, why is it a secret?  It seems like no one is allowed to talk about how commonplace murder is for the five people who don't murder people?  Like, the secrecy makes it cool.  The Continental is the crux of this story and it's this whole secret hotel that houses assassins in luxury. That's fun.  But basically, every homeless person is an assassin.  Little old ladies are assassins.  And it seems like John Wick knows all of them or knows about all of them.  It's kind of the problem with escalation stories.  But again, I tend to overthink these things and this movie really wants you not to think about it too hard. But back to my original point before I started overthinking things: it both fufills its promise and kind of nerfs it at the same time.

It's not as much of a nerf as Aliens is.  (I know, I'm the only person who is mad at Aliens, so just accept it.)  The movie starts out exactly how I want it to start.  For a long time, John Wick is just fighting everyone.  Now, this blog is about my acceptance of hypocrisy.  I acknowledge that I don't like when people say movies are great because a fight sequence is "sick."  But these fight sequences are SICK.  The reason that I excuse it?  It's because John Wick never pretends that it is something elevated.  I knows it wants to stick an unstoppable force against an immovable object.  That's the movie.  Sure, John can, for some reason, take an insane amount of damage, especially in comparison to his peers.  It actually makes for really weird storytelling because John often gets out of problems by having people, rightly so, assuming that he's dead.  Like, the movie is John losing a bunch of fights and then just being gone.  But whatever.  Back to the point.  The first forty minutes of this movie is just violence and I almost couldn't believe that a movie would  commit to a bit that hard.  I thought the entire movie was just going to be John Wick surviving attacks until everyone is dead.  Sure, it makes for a completely fluffy movie, but it's also gutsy. 

But that's where the movie nerfs.  Because at one point, they get John out of the situation of survival and it introduces a plot that almost seems like a cop out.  This is me being a little bit nitpicky, but the end of Chapter 2 made it sound like John's contract is so dour that there was no way out except for killing everybody. But then, there's a secret meeting that you can arrange?  There's a way back into good graces?  No!  The rules were "kill everybody."  I mean, John still does kill nearly everybody.  But I don't like the idea that there's a way out of this.  As much as we were promised that it was John v. the World, where the movie mostly delivers, I also don't want a Get-Out-of-Jail option. I saw the moment when the filmmakers stared death in the face and then flinched.  And I'll give them points.  They lasted longer than a lot of other filmmakers would.  But still, I had a contract, Jonathan.  You are called to fulfill that contract and, ironically, this is a movie all about being called to fufill one's duty.

But they undid it pretty quickly, so I can't harp on that too much.  Can I tell you what is good filmmaking because it makes me the right level of mad?  Winston's betrayal is perfect.  It's absolutely perfect.  Sure, I don't love that John just survives falling off the Continental because that clearly would have killed any other character and it also minimizes how much John has to put up with, but whatever.  But I didn't see it coming.  It felt like the movie was putting this nice little bow on the story and then Winston ends up being a realistic jerk?  Now, I'm sure that there's probably a faction that says that Winston is acting out of character.  I can see this.  After all, we're in the third movie and it seems like John and Winston are so buddy-buddy that Winston would be willing to upset the high table by not instantly killing John on the spot.  But we also, over the course of these three films, understand Winston's priorities.  Winston isn't devoted to the High Table.  He's not devoted to those he cares about.  He cares about one thing and one thing only: being in charge of the New York branch of The Continental.  When he shoots John, it is a deep understanding of what his character is supposed to be.  It's about priorities and manipulation.  It's kind of amazing and it makes me mad.  It's because we like that character so much that villainizing emotionally shifts us.  It's making sure that no character is too precious to make it out of this intact.

Can we talk about Halle Berry for a second?  I don't know how appropriate the following comments would be, but I feel like I want to talk about these ideas.  Halle Berry seems to make choices about movies based on a lack of risk.  Ironically, most of these choices tend to bite her in the butt.  I don't know how John Wick: Chapter 3 affected her overall career.  But Halle Berry as Sofia in Chapter 3 is the same as her character Jinx in Die Another Day.  She comes into franchises as female versions of the male protagonist.  They are as capable as the male protagonist.  If anything, she puts the male protagonist in their places.  Now, I should be rah-rah about this, but it feels like she isn't advancing the cause as just being a copy of something that already exists. Listen, She-Hulk was one of my favorite things that Marvel has done. I know.  I'm the one who loved it. But She-Hulk, the show, was a commentary on the lazy writing that men did with comic books.  In an attempt to get more readers, male writers would do the bare minimum amount of work to just copy the main character and change the gender words around it.  This is Halle Berry's bread and butter.  AND I CAN'T STOP SEEING HALLE BERRY!  Listen, John Wick might be Keanu Reeves' best role because I don't see Keanu when he's there.  That's beyond amazing for me.  But I just see Halle Berry trying to make a buck.  I want her to be a new character.  I want her to have her own franchise that's risky and built from the ground up. Sure, she can be kicking butt, but at least start with something fresh.  Have it be unlike anything I've seen before.  Yeah, I'm writing from a place of privilege.  I know that it must be incredibly difficult to sell a new concept as a Black woman.  But I just don't think that Halle Berry is doing herself a service taking these roles.

Listen, I tried catching up for Chapter 4.  I hear insane things about that one.  Also, I wanted to watch the movie while I was still excited.  Chapter 3 is really good.  It's not as good or original as Chapter 2, but it is still in the right place.