John Wick: Parabellum (2019) — Review

The third John Wick instalment proved that the franchise knows its formula and knows how to develop it- expertly amping up the three key elements of violence, visuals, and, er, dogs. A neo-noir which brought ‘Nice Guy Keanu’ — breathtaking Keanu, as one phase in his meme teleology would have it — to a new audience of action fans and Y2K fetishists, John Wick’s first two iterations had achieved arguably already surprising success. After a few lackluster offerings in the early 2010s — notably flops 47 Ronin and Man of Tai Chi — Reeves’ career resurgence was driven by taking the focus off his Asian side and turning to the role of Belarusian assassin Jardani Jovonovich, a superassassin on a rampage after the death of his wife and puppy.

Parabellum picks up where the sequel left off with no introductions or preambles. There's no time — it’s 5:07 pm, as an opening clock tells us, and at 6 pm the official excommunication of John Wick from his society of assassins will come into force, triggering open season on his already harried person. Thus the film plunges into a sort of cinematic roving New York fight club, starting with the clash between Wick and the first of his countless challengers, a flurry of hands, feet and a hefty tome of ancient Russian fairy tales deployed against a 2.2-meter Serbian basketball player inside the New York Public Library. A flying stop by an underground sewer doctor for the stab wound in his shoulder, and off we go again against a gang of roving kung fu experts, in a very long and elaborate sequence for the martial arts aficionados in Reeves’ entourage.

Parabellum starts in this vein, and maintains the trajectory for a good two hours. From the first film it has been clear that in this series we do not stop for a moment, that Wick does nothing but charge onwards, leaving a pile of corpses, and that no blow, stab, bullet can stop him. Because he, even when he is bruised — very bruised, as in this third chapter — is Baba Yaga. There is no stopping in John Wick’s world: the race has begun and the progression is inexorable.

If the second chapter was already faster and more violent than the first, the third surpasses both of them, rendering the traditional narrative little more than filler between one action scene and another, trailing small clues about the protagonist's past. A scene in New York where Anjelica Huston informs us that John is actually a Belarusian Roma serves as an awkward, ballet-inflected excuse to relocate to Morocco. The move, however, is more than justified by the trail of carnage Wick inflicts with Sofia (Halle Berry) and her two parkour-trained Malinois attack dogs. Again, though, the ensuing wander through the desert is an indisputable low point.

The world in John Wick is one of rules, and of consequences for those who violate them; in this chapter it also becomes a world where fidelity to promises and friendships seems more and more evanescent. Love and anger are the ying and yang that keep Wick going —hence the importance of animal involvement — and the antes ascend enough in this outing that John doesn't even need to answer the closing question: "Are you pissed?". He certainly is — although like his audience, after 131 minutes of fighting with bare hands, firearms, dogs, horses and men’s fashion accessories, he’s ready for a break.