John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is back, on another incontinent and indeed inter-continental killing spree.
It all began, you might recall, when someone killed his puppy in the first film. Wick is a dog-lover, and if you harm his canine best friend, then good luck to you. You might have time to kiss your loved ones goodbye before he blows your head off, but probably not. He is one-third Doris Day, two-thirds Dirty Harry.
Having followed the trail of corpses through the first two films, I sat down to this one determined to keep track of how, as well as how many, Eastern European, North African and Asian heavies Wick sends to the Great Hereafter. Wick has 1,000 ways of killing a man who has crossed him, and 500 ways of killing a man who hasn’t, but simply knows someone who has.
Unfortunately, my resolve melted after the very first burst of extreme violence, which takes place in the New York Public Library. There, Wick has an altercation with a thug the size of a wardrobe, eventually battering him to kingdom come with a book of Russian folk tales.
It’s like a deranged version of Cluedo, not that there’s any mystery identifying the killer when Wick is in town. Anyway, that’s when I knew I had to bail out early from any attempt at a body count. When it kicks off with death by textbook, it’s only going to get weirder.
And it does, of course. The third film starts where the second ended, with Wick, the greatest professional assassin of all time, himself in mortal danger of assassination.
His only real friend is a pitbull, although this is not one man and his dog as the late Phil Drabble would have recognised it. Nobly, Wick prioritises the dog’s safety even before his own.
There’s a $14 million bounty on his head and he is running — as well one might — through the rain-lashed streets of Manhattan before the contract goes ‘open’, meaning anyone can terminate him.
Anyone with a death wish of their own, that is. Trying to whack Wick is even more perilous than knocking off his pooch.
Later, in Morocco, a bunch of Arab would-be fundamentalists have a go, but by then Wick has enlisted the help of his old friend Sofia (Halle Berry), who shares his soft spot for all things canine, leading to what can really only be called the film’s ‘Wick whack Jihadi attack, give the dog a bone’ segment.
First things first, though. In New York, the shadowy assassins’ guild called the High Table is closing in on Wick. Its flint-hearted female emissary, The Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), has a nasty way of discouraging anyone who might help Wick from doing so.
These include his old sparring partner Winston, the world’s most menacing hotel manager, played by a typically saturnine Ian McShane, and an underground crime lord known as the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne).
Director Chad Stahelski, who also brought us John Wick chapters 1 and 2, can’t be faulted for the quality of his supporting cast. Even Anjelica Huston pops up, playing the heavy accented director of a dance company who goes back longer than most in Wick’s life, for reasons I can’t possibly divulge, not if I know what’s good for me.
Wick, while rarely stringing together more than five consecutive words, certainly knows what’s good for him. In one of his more voluble outbursts, he seeks a meeting with ‘the one who sits above the Table’.
The Adjudicator, meanwhile, wants him to reaffirm his ‘fealty to the Table’. If the non-stop killing doesn’t eventually give you the giggles during this film, the dialogue will.
Anyway, with New York too dangerous for Wick, given that every cab driver and down-and-out seems to recognise him, he legs it to Casablanca. Sofia doesn’t seem too happy to see him. Are they former lovers? All we know of Wick’s romantic past is that he had a wife who expired in the first film, rendering him even more heartbroken than the puppy snuffing.
For Wick, grief has a way of resurfacing as homicidal frenzy. He’s been slaughtering battalions of hitmen ever since.
In Casablanca, the killing slows down only to accommodate a spot of dismemberment and torture — flay it again, Sam. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall murder. Sofia might not seem too sure about Wick, but once her killer Belgian shepherds take a shine to him, they’re a deadly gang of four, leaving another huge pile of corpses behind.
By now, in fact well before now, the violence in John Wick 3 has become like nudity in a porn film — it has been leached of all excitement, all meaning, by the sheer, ludicrous, de-sensitising abundance of it.
Undoubtedly, the fight choreography — which even yields the bizarre spectacle of Wick nobbling motorcycle executioners while galloping through Manhattan on horseback — is terrific. And Reeves gives a charismatic lead performance, tearing another page from the Clint Eastwood manual of laconic hard men.
But if I never again see John Wick loading a new cartridge into his gun just in time to shoot a hoodlum in the head, it will still be slightly too soon.
